Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980's, this coolly mesmerizing novel is a raw, powerful portraitof a lost generation who have experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age, in aworld shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money a place devoid of feeling orhope.Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college and re-enters a landscape oflimitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porches, dines at Spago, and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for hisbest friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holidayturns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzymansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs and also into the seamy world of L.A. after dark.
