Joe McGinniss Jr. writes like an ’80s Brat Pack writer, which in 2016 is about as peculiar as writing like Henry James or specializing in Petrarchan sonnets. Except that in the public imagination, McGinniss’s choice is about ten times worse. In their signature novels, Bright Lights, Big City and Less than Zero, Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis claimed the portion of the zeitgeist that’s always reserved for youthful disillusionment. But by decade’s end — and especially after Ellis’s over-the-top Grand Guignol capitalist satire, American Psycho — literary culture was exhausted with twentysomething novelists and their novels lacquered in brand names and bad habits. Spy magazine, which routinely skewered the cohort’s foibles, zapped the genre with a CliffsNotes parody in 1989, arguing that, ultimately, there was no there there. (“What effect did Ellis hope to achieve by italicizing certain passages in the book? Do you care?”)

But McGinniss still believes, and there is much in his second novel, Carousel Court, to suggest his belief isn’t misplaced. Those Carveresque lines can evoke characters’ willful shallowness, not the writer’s; brand names can deliver a brisker critique of capitalism than more social-realist, Franzen-y methods; fantasias of drugs and violence can still do useful work to expose our fears and moral corrosion. More important, McGinniss recognizes that the genre is well suited to the post−Great Recession era, where middle-aged, middle-class financial dreams and foibles can seem all the more poignantly misguided.

That’s the case for the housing development of the book’s title, located forty miles east of L.A. and a Boulevard of Broken Dreams for its lead couple, Phoebe and Nick. They’re raising their toddler son, Jackson, in a place where many neighboring houses are vacant and where the rest burn their furniture and keep guns handy. “More stainless steel. More square footage. More landscaping,” McGinniss writes of the original dream. And it all turned out to be less.

Nick’s filmmaking work brought the family west from Boston, but with the industry in a slump, he’s relegated to cleaning out foreclosed houses to stay in the black. Phoebe has jumped from financial services to pharmaceutical sales, a despairing gig that largely involves her sending flirty selfies to doctors to complete sales for a drug company that drags its heels on gas reimbursement. She befogs herself with Klonopin to cope, even though the resulting mental haze led to a car accident that left Jackson with a head injury. Nick blithely sexts with a coworker’s girlfriend, bemoans his fate (“How many Emerson College media production majors does it take to remove a rotting dog from a bedroom closet?”), hatches a scheme to secretly rent out vacant houses, and resents his wife.

All of which is to say that Nick and Phoebe are as unlikable as they are desperate, and bad parents besides — if they’re not squabbling in front of their child, they’re fobbing him off on a nanny they can barely afford or letting him get precariously close to household dangers like the drained backyard pool. (Every gated-community amenity, from the pool to the climbing wall, is a threat.) The precarious mood is exacerbated once Phoebe reconnects with her old financial services mentor, who dangles promises of a new job and a better life if only she’ll abandon her husband.

Yet the tension in Carousel Court isn’t driven by the fate of Nick and Phoebe’s marriage — or even Nick’s well-being once his squatlord racket wobbles. The two are too deliberately flat and emotionless for that. (Phoebe is a study in anonymity: “Hers is a face people steal when they create fake online profiles.”) The tension is in that disconnection — how much of our lives do we need to live via text message and selfie, in anonymous hotels, in half-abandoned housing communities, before we lose our sense of self?

McGinniss is gifted at cultivating a feeling of emotional distance in response to that question. Something menacing is always happening just a tick away in the novel: A neighbor camps outside with a rifle; a passing car has a bumper sticker reading “Ask Me About My AK-47”; cicadas creep under unkept lawns; low-flying police helicopters constantly speed by like wind through wheatfields in a Willa Cather novel. Those gestures are all ripped clean from the Brat Pack playbook, where ennui, disillusionment, and narcissism were our default positions in a hypermediated and overmedicated society. But those ’80s kids had money, college educations, jobs, and talent to squander; as universal statements went, they felt niche. In Carousel Court, the themes gain more gravitas when there’s a couple with an underwater house and a kid to raise, and community of bad-news acquaintances who also got dealt a bad hand.

McGinniss is the son of the late journalist Joe McGinniss, who played a central role in the Brat Pack era, mentoring Donna Tartt and Ellis at Bennington College. (Ellis dedicated Less than Zero to him.) In turn, Ellis sherpa’d McGinniss fils through his debut novel, 2008’s The Delivery Man, a Zero-ishly austere study of Las Vegas youth. McGinniss grew up enchanted with this territory, and he has it pretty much all to himself now: Ellis is busier with screenplays, and not even McInerney writes like McInerney anymore. McGinniss will need to do more if he wants to build a movement out of it, though. Phoebe and Nick have about three too many hollow squabbles followed by hollow reconciliations, and he could stand to be funnier; Carousel Court‘s dark mood leaves little room for dark satire. But his dry, crisp, sun-glared vision also suggests a path for fiction that is at once existential and operatic, slick but with a moral imperative, too. “I have blood on my iPhone,” Nick texts after a moment when things go violently south. In Nick’s case it’s literally true; for the rest of us, McGinniss offers a metaphor that isn’t hard to decipher.

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