Clean living

Seth GREENLAND'S very funny second novel shows how easily money rubs out our naive notions of right and wrong, especially in a city like L.A., where trying to be decent can seem not merely foolish but self-destructive and self-indulgent. Greenland's hero, Marcus Ripps, starts out as a middle-class guy with a wife, a son and a two-story, three-bedroom house in an unfashionable neighborhood. "No one aspired to live in Van Nuys," Greenland writes, with an aphoristic brilliance that, as far I am concerned, is customary. "In a gamy corner of the San Fernando Valley, it was a hardscrabble neighborhood of mini-malls, fast food joints, and cheap motels with rooms by the hour. The air was thick with skyborne detritus, and in the summer the mercury spiked to a hundred and twenty degrees."

Marcus' life hasn't panned out the way he hoped. He has a philosophy degree from Berkeley and once counted on a career of entrepreneurial success, but he works instead for a friend from high school, Roon Primus, the malicious baron of Wazoo Toys. Marcus toils whereas Roon has "ascended to fawning profiles in business journals and a palatial house in Bel-Air." In one scene -- a surreal and scathingly evoked bar mitzvah -- Marcus spots Roon greeting "a tall elegantly dressed man with a smile like a cash register. It took Marcus a moment to realize that it was the governor of California."

Marcus rubs shoulders with wealth and fame while himself enjoying neither. His son, Nathan, attends a private school on a scholarship, and his wife, Jan, is partner in a small boutique on Van Nuys Boulevard. The seeming stability of the Ripps family hangs by a thread, and this breaks when Roon announces one day that he's decided to outsource Wazoo Toys to China. He casually instructs Marcus to learn Mandarin, but instead Marcus quits. Debts mount and the family's equity line dwindles.

Greenland isn't interested in taking us inside the terror of middle-class economic crisis. Marcus remains an optimist, and the reader never really fears that he's heading off the rails like, say, a John Cheever character. Instead, Greenland throws his protagonist a narrative lifeline with a classic Hollywood twist: Julian, Marcus' black sheep brother, dies and leaves Marcus a dry-cleaning business named Shining City in West Hollywood. Shining City, Marcus soon discovers, is a front for an escort service. Marcus grits his teeth and becomes a pimp, determined to bring "the brightest standards of American management practice to the business of prostitution."