Grant Ginder’s lightly satirical novel about the young, wealthy political set in Washington, D.C., is a shallow, clichéd, and not particularly likable book about shallow, clichéd, and not particularly likable people. This could be the whole point; Ginder has said as much in an interview. But that hardly qualifies as a recommendation of the book, and suggests instead a failure of authorial imagination: It doesn’t take an entire novel to make the point that vacuous, self-indulgent people are vacuous and self-indulgent.

The story itself is thin: a bildungsroman plot with a main character who bears a suspicious resemblance to the author. Ginder is a mid-20s speechwriter for the Center for American Progress, a prominent liberal think tank; he grew up in California, graduated from Penn, and interned on the Hill. The book’s protagonist, Taylor Mark, is a native Californian with a degree from Penn who finds his way to a Hill office where, eventually, he begins to write brief speeches. From there, Taylor, with the aid of Chase Latham, a well-connected but obnoxious college friend, finds his way into a cliquey band of attractive, moneyed Washingtonians — as well as into the bed of his congressman boss’s bombshell wife, Juliana. Unsurprisingly, the fast life proves thrilling but unsustainable.

Ginder’s observational prose is often quite sharp — it’s the best thing about the book — but his dialogue tends toward the obvious and melodramatic. Characters speak in carefully crafted epigrams, as if on a constant mission to spell out each scene’s themes. Toward the end, Chase asks, “Isn’t this what this is all about? Finding someone who’s done something just that much more despicable than you? Shame trumps shame.” Intending to teach Taylor a tough life lesson, Juliana leaves him at a bar with the following bit of gritty Washington wisdom: “You can put deceit in diamonds, or you can put it in pearls. But it all looks the same when the lights are off. . . . You’re on a sinking ship, Taylor. We both are.” By this point, readers, too, will be searching for their life vests.

A host of minor plot holes sink the book even faster. Taylor is portrayed as poor enough to need help paying his rent, but unconcerned enough about money to shell out for $450 loafers and round after round of expensive liquor. And, as an outsider in Chase’s world, Taylor has to be taught to dress in all the right brands — a world of luxury to which, prior to coming to Washington, he was oblivious. Yet in his narration, he effortlessly identifies the designers behind what seems like every piece of clothing he spots. (This warmed-over Bret Easton Ellis style might have made more sense had the novel been written from a retrospective point of view, but it’s written in the present tense.)

Ginder never seems to be able to decide whether Taylor is a world-weary Washingtonian or — more realistically, given the plot — a D.C. neophyte. After he’s spent just a few weeks in town, we find him passing judgment on the city as if he’d lived there a lifetime: “But from what I can tell, this city’s got enough deceit.” And: “It’s the way we work: Upon seeing another man’s transgression, the ostensible part of our psyche condemns and berates and tsk-tsks his sins. But that other part, that other voice — the one that gets louder with gin — enrages us with taunts that he’s having something we’ll never have the courage to touch.”

It’s hard to buy this sort of lamentation from a character so young and so fresh on the scene, even taking into consideration the city’s tendency to attract narcissistic, seen-it-all 24-year-olds. But it fits with a larger problem, which is that Ginder never decides where he wants to go with his tale and therefore peppers it with aimless subplots. Midway through the book, it’s revealed that, as a child, Taylor was bullied. Later, pressed to find some inoffensive legislation for his boss to cosponsor after a gaffe, Taylor successfully pushes for a bill on bullying. This allows Ginder to make a few clever jokes about the prefab banality of speechwriting — no doubt gleaned from firsthand experience — but the storyline never goes anywhere.

Still, the subplot provides two things that the rest of the novel lacks: politics and character background. For a novel about Washington’s young political elite, this book is surprisingly free of anything resembling actual politics. Characters occasionally identify themselves as Republicans or Democrats, and a few of the Republicans occasionally joke about Democrats’ being “Commies,” but not once in the novel does anyone claim to have anything like a convicted political belief, much less an ideology. Reading Ginder’s novel, one might think the city subsisted on glamorous dinners and discussion of designer fashion and overpriced alcohol. If only! The truth is that D.C.’s social scene is the only one in the country in which it’s permissible to go to a bar and have a lengthy, detailed discussion about farm subsidies.

It might be argued by the more cynical among us that, in truth, no one in Washington actually does believe in anything. Yet even the city’s most disingenuous operators at least claim to believe certain things about policy and governance. In Ginder’s Washington, though, such things are an afterthought — and especially so in the case of his protagonist.

Despite more than 250 pages of first-person narration, there’s precious little to be said about Taylor Mark. Passive in the extreme, he spends most of the story reacting to or commenting on those around him. But it’s never clear what he wants or what he believes. Most young political staffers evince a precarious sense of self — but most also have goals of some sort, as well as particular interests and political beliefs, even if they’re not well grounded. Taylor has a dysfunctional family and a degree from Penn, but not much else.

So what’s he doing in Washington? For that matter, what are any of the characters — only one of whom seems to have any specific political ambition — doing in the city? They drink, they gossip, they flirt and sleep around. They talk about political people, but almost never about politics. That might make for a more attractive vision of the city, but, as anyone who’s spent any time in the city’s political corridors can attest, it’s wishful thinking. This Is How It Starts fails because it makes the mistake of thinking that Washington is a city in which politics is nothing, when the scarier truth is that it’s everything.