How does one respond to grief? In Jade Chang’s sophomore novel, “What a Time to Be Alive,” the answer is, at least, creative: become an influencer and start paying off your student loans.

Lola Treasure Gold, Chang’s spirited protagonist, leads an unremarkable life. In her early 30s, Lola is saddled with debt and unresolved questions about a mother who disappeared. Her romantic history, while varied and passionate, has been a series of failures, and when she isn’t eking out a meager living conducting historical research, she passes her days in what can only be described as a sunny Californian haze of goodwill and good company.

The book’s inciting incident is the unexpected loss of one of Lola’s best friends, Alex, who died in a freak skateboarding accident while performing a stunt. During a memorial for Alex, Lola is unknowingly filmed participating in a game where she must sustain a minute of talking on a randomly assigned topic. Her exposition on “scam” soon goes viral, and Lola finds herself launched into the capricious world of internet fame “as some sort of guru” with a catchphrase: “Be your own beacon.”

Lola is convincing enough as the underdog — broke, perpetually searching for a new job and romance — for readers to side with her. But that’s more or less where the connection ends. Our heroine laughs and cries … a lot. That’s to be expected in a work that delves into mourning and its surreal expression in the contemporary world (and, by extension, the world wide web). Yet, the laughter often seems the laughter of an inside joke that is shared among friends, which the reader never becomes fully privy to.

As tears in the book accumulate, as swells of emotion grow, as characters process their feelings and realize love is the only unifying force in the world, it’s possible to experience more than a whiff of embarrassment, such as when Lola says, “I laughed again, and I didn’t care now that I was crying, too. We should all be crying all the time; the world deserved every one of our tears …”

Perhaps ironic is the fact that a book that celebrates the value of emotion so much should be utterly devoid of it. Grief laid bare doesn’t always — in fact, doesn’t usually — make the successful leap from the page to the reader’s heart.

As the title suggests, “What a Time to Be Alive” attempts to elicit laughter and instill a sense of joie de vivre, but its dramatic moments are often overly done, even cringe-worthy, like watching a stand-up comedy routine that’s rife with halfhearted punchlines, so bad it’s memorable.

At once navel-gazing and vapid, Chang’s follow-up to “The Wangs vs. the World” resorts to feel-good platitudes that ultimately can’t be distinguished from the lie, the “scam” that Lola manages, with increasing conviction, to sell to her followers (“But listen, we are luminous beings and we are crude matter. … Everything in our bodies is made of stardust”).

Satire is hard, and writing a novel of manners intimately connected with social media is even harder, of course. Despite the novel’s faults, it’s a testament to the author’s skill that Lola stands out as a luminescent, compelling narrator who transforms into her own greatest champion. What a pity, however, that, like so much of social media in the “real world,” the book doesn’t really have anything original to say.

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What a Time to Be Alive

By: Jade Chang.

Publisher: Ecco, 296 pages.

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