By the sound of it, Winter in Hollywood should be a warm, glamorous affair packed with decorated palm trees, brushes with celebrities, and yoga classes full of people grimly working out their New Year’s resolutions. But Richard Teleky’s latest novel, for better or for worse, does not dwell on these themes. Instead we get a story of loss played out among the hummingbirds and potted plants of an apartment block in California.

The only thing worse than a child dying before her parents, Teleky suggests, is a child who dies without letting her parents find out who she really is. The story begins with an arrival. Irene Dunne has come to her daughter’s apartment to take care of all that’s been left behind after her fatal car accident. Irene is a woman who has, over the course of her solid midwestern life, “taken care of her family, put one foot in front of the other. Still, people kept dying on her, each leaving her diminished.”

Irene’s only daughter, Holly, left for Hollywood as a young woman and worked on the production side of the movies. Contact between them was never close, and Irene knew little of Holly’s life until her trip to California to deal with its aftermath. Upon arrival she is puzzled by Holly’s friends, their memories of her daughter and the person she became. Holly’s last wishes are just one example of the gulf between them. She wanted to have her ashes scattered in the patio garden of the Chateau Marmont. Irene has no idea what the Marmont even is.

Eventually Irene meets the residents of the apartment building, a gang that includes Tony Nakamura, the gay florist, who pops by with videos from Hollywood’s golden era. There is Magda, the imposing Hungarian who seems to house a group of young pregnant women. The first one Irene encounters is Juli, a dopey but well-meaning girl from Budapest who is more fixated on River Phoenix than her growing bump.

River Phoenix, one might ask? When is this set? Don’t let the Phoenix reference fool you; these are definitely the late-Clinton years. Monica is mentioned on the news. “Fellatio” and “impeachment” flash across the screen. This may be a small detail to bring up, but it points toward a far broader problem with the novel. The story feels haphazardly tied to an era and a setting. The lack of observation allows Teleky to skate along the surface, which at first fits Irene’s numbed and grieving mental state. Not only has she lost her only daughter, she has a tendency to recede back to the recent memories of her deceased husband. But Teleky needs to flesh out his California locations. He occasionally attempts to satirize the airheaded SoCal conversations Irene overhears, but these never transcend cliché.

Ultimately, the mechanics of the story are the greatest letdown. After her arrival in California, none of Irene’s interactions with the characters in the apartment building are able to ratchet up the novel’s pace. There are plenty of drifting scenes that could easily be cut. The dialogue fills up space but rarely pushes characters forward or acts as a tool of revelation.

The plot does not budge without the occasional push. At her advanced age, Irene has become the sole standing member of her family. There are no grandchildren, there will be no continuation – a point that is driven home when Irene discovers that Holly meant to adopt the baby of one of Magda’s Hungarian visitors. It’s disappointing to have these revelations appear in the story only to have them sink back down into inertia.

And oh, the inertia. “Sitting in Holly’s apartment was like being buried alive,” is how Teleky describes Irene’s days. “There was nothing left to do. Nothing.” If Teleky is trying to conjure up the essence of grief, he gets the long stretches of boredom right but leaves his characters underused. There is a great sadness at the core of this novel, but it is not effectively dramatized. The book starts placid, quiet. Slow movement becomes glacial. The tenants in the apartment block are all well-meaning and sweet, but these characters, poor creatures, are not quite bursting with that integral sense of creation.

Children elude you, Irene reminds herself at one point. This, the book’s essential message, should have been a rich vein to explore. What about Holly’s romantic life? The mystery? The man she was driving with at the time of her death? He turns out to be a lover, but none of this is reflected back to shed light on Holly’s life.

Perhaps these issues would not be such a problem if Teleky had found a satisfying end to the novel. Instead, like a slap to the face of readers who have followed along, there is a climactic scene fashioned out of outrageous, misplaced melodrama and then a denouement that only amplifies the frustration. It’s an escape rather than an ending, a spot of random violence instead of a considered and crafted finale. Unfortunately, what could have been an examination of grief becomes an opportunity missed.