L.A. bte noire Wagner (TV's Wild Palms) is back, having another go at Hollywood and its scuzzy bottom-feeders, which, if he is to be believed, includes everyone: the players (some of whom are real people) and the played-upon. He spares no one hereexcept perhaps smart-ass social critic novelistsand scathingly covers the field from the scourge of AIDS to zombie movies. The book is a little too delirious for its own good, but the author is consistent and manages to keep his often horrifying characters churning above the wake of his perfervid prose in good soap-opera fashion. Wagner is like Kerouac on brand names and movie lore. If the author can be described as using a sniper's rifle in his excellent novel Force Majeure (St. Martins, 1991), here he wields a sawed-off shotgun, but with less success. The results are often obscene and more often very, very funny, although not for the faint-hearted. Most large fiction collections will want this.David Bartholomew, NYPL
Screenwriter and novelist Wagner, in what may be the ultimate Hollywood-insider novel, lets loose quite a cast of characters: the drug-addled Big Star, a superimportant ICM agent, an aspiring porn star, a deluded masseuse who thinks she can control her clients, a lesbian producer, and a celebrity psychiatrist, along with walk-ons by the likes of Holly Hunter and Alec Baldwin. Structured like an Altman film, the point of view switches from character to character as we listen in to their cellular phone calls, read their e-mail, eavesdrop on restaurant conversations, and watch as their lives occasionally intersect. Never has the reader assumed more the role of voyeur than with this novel, and never has a voyeur become more quickly sullied. From sexual coercion to New Age nuttiness to unbridled materialism, nearly every vignette succeeds in leaving the reader appalled. If there is a theme that pulls these stories together, it is that of exploitation: everyone, from the waitress to the biggest producer, is on the make for something. A darkly comic satire to be enjoyed by those with the stomach for it.
Well, here comes the it book of late summer, anointed with flecks of beach water by John Updike in The New Yorker and by The New York Times, which recently featured Wagner in a rare daily author profile. For a second-time novelist -- Wagner is also the author of the cult hit Force Majeure (1991) -- this one-two PR whammy is the equivalent of a film star landing the covers of Vanity Fair and Newsweek.
Here's a heads-up, however, from someone who recently spent eight hours with I'm Losing You, in his lap: Don't buy the buzz, and forgive Updike the (rare) critical misfire. I'm Losing You is indeed caustic and intermittently brilliant, but any stray fireworks are buried beneath mountains of gassy chat, unfiltered gossip and 100-proof psychobabble.
Wagner does have a good feel for low- and mid-level Hollywood lives. I'm Losing You takes its title from what the book's characters shout during fuzzy cell phone conversations, and this story is studded with tart, throw-away observations, from the shape of one former actress' "I-shit-on-you-mouth" to Hollywood's burgeoning number of "H.I.V.I.P.s" -- industry insiders with AIDS.
What the novel lacks, however, are fleshed-out characters and any sense of narrative arc; the action scrolls past as if under a microscope. Dozens of amoeba-like neurotics emerge briefly from the murk -- producers, porn directors, agents, dermatologists, aging stars -- deliver their brassy monologues, and disappear. Everyone is selling something, and the disposable dialogue is peppered with legions of bold-face names:
"Tell you one thing: Dawn Steel would not do a remake of Pasolini's Teorema. She's too smart for that ... Would still kill for Jane Campion (I BRAKE FOR BERTOLUCCI), but Saul says she's booked for like six years. (He actually suggested Amy Heckerling.) I remain adamantine about having a woman at the helm (that's Chayevskypeak -- remember Bill Holden saying that in Network?"
I'm Losing You is already being compared with Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust and Michael Tolkin's The Player, and Updike's review evoked the ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald. But as talented as Wagner can occasionally be, I'm Losing You -- unlike Tolkin's shrewd and sturdy novel -- evaporates as soon as the final page flickers past. Like a Carrie Fisher book helmed by Oliver Stone, I'm Losing You is arch, creepy, over-the-top -- and infuriatingly static. --Salon
Bruce Wagner knows his Hollywood, and writes like a wizard.
-- The New Yorker
The year's best book.
-- New York Magazine
Screenwriter Wagner's second well-done Hollywood novel (Force Majeure, 1991) surveys the mostly sordid L.A. scene from top to bottom, making up for a lack of dramatic focus with lots of hypergossipy vignettes of hustling, deviance, New Age goofiness, and consumer lustand that's just among the successful.
Wagner's bitchy narrative compiles an index of Hollywood types from pathetic wannabes and has-beens to lucky arrivistes and powerbrokers. Their degrees of separation are much lower than you'd expect, forming a daisy-chain of odd relations, with such sites in common as a children-with-AIDS benefit, a New Age seminar, and restaurants where the help is always on the entertainment make. Mostly, though, Wagner's characters speak in manic monologues, and the result is a cacophony of disembodied cellular voices. They include those of the dying wife of a producer, her hot-shot ICM agent-son, a Big Star with a taste for drugs and melodrama, her drug-pushing doctor, and a psychiatrist's son who makes a living cleaning out dead animals from houses. Women sound off in various genres: A producer hoping to remake Pasolini's Teorema pens her memoir á la Julia Phillips; an insane masseuse claims in her manuscript to have conceived the hottest TV shows; a waitress turned porn star commits her aspirations to a diary; and a TV casting director, hoping to be a movie producer, writes letters to her newborn son, blind from birth and rejected by his coke-addled dad. Wagner dips his pen deep in venom for his portraits of truly despicable characters like mega-hit producer Zev Turtletaub, an obnoxious member of the gay elite, who treats his assistant like a sex slave and has little time for his own sister, dying of AIDS.
Much smarter than the recent bunch of novels and movies on Hollywood, and much more believable for its very lack of a narrative hook.
PRAISE FOR I’M LOSING YOU
“Ruthlessly hip and very funny.”—Wired
“The author’s images, tones and language give I’m Losing You a hard beauty that glints like a black crystal.”—Time
“Mr. Wagner . . . treats us to many glorious phrases and whole passages that have the self-propelled rhythm of great prose.”—Adam Begley, New York Observer
“Electrifying . . . a viciously funny, kaleidoscopically plotted Hollywood satire. Will invite comparisons to Robert Altman, Tom Wolfe, or any other modern Swift or Pope you can think of.”—Boston Book Review
“A funnier and even more brutal Hollywood send-up than his previous novel, Force Majeure . . . brilliant.”—New York Post
“All of [the characters] are finely, beautifully drawn. . . . Wagner manages to breathe so much life into them that even their most despicable acts are understandable.”—The Advocate
“The most distinctive Jewish novel since Portnoy’s Complaint.”—Jewish Journal
“A meditation on moral corruption and loss which is at turns hilarious, tragic, and at times as caustic as a shot of kerosene.”—Detour
“A dazzling prose stylist.”—Hartford Courant
PRAISE FOR BRUCE WAGNER
"He is a visionary posing as a farceur."—Salman Rushdie
“Wagner the doctor/novelist addresses his patients in an austere and loving tone. He grants haunted forgiveness. He is fully aware of the cost of spiritual hunger in the face of fame and all its temptations. He castigates, comforts and reprimands in equal doses and offers us novels of tenderness and grandeur.”—James Ellroy
“If it was the promise of laughter that first drew me to Wagner’s work, it is his language that has kept me hooked... Marveling at his comic and linguistic gifts, at his sheer storytelling verve – his ability to handle large ensembles of characters and keep numerous narrative balls in the air while at the same time shooting flames from his mouth and balancing a naked lady on his nose – I nevertheless introduce Wagner’s work to my writing students with a caution: Don’t try this at home.” —Sigrid Nunez
"Bruce Wagner is Hollywood’s master of satire."—Sam Wasson, author of The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood
"Wagner is the James Joyce whose Dublin is Hollywood."—David Cronenberg
"Bruce Wagner writes really wonderfully about that whole milieu [of Hollywood] and its gothic vanity."—Emma Cline
“I’m a big Bruce Wagner fan.”—Father John Misty
"Bruce Wagner's stories about Hollywood are the best I've read since F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West."—Terry Southern
"Wagner writes like a wizard. His prose writhes and coruscates."—John Updike