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Hollywood Satiricon

Bruce Wagner infects his novels with madness, celebrity, name-dropping, drugs and sex. And that's just the realism.

Thursday, January 27, 2005 - 12:00 am

Photos by Debra DiPaolo

Bruce Wagner nursed a large latte and studied The New York Times. As always, he was dressed in black, and two or three days’ dark stubble decorated his cheeks and prominent chin. His eyes, warm and brown like those of a highly intelligent dog, peered out of hefty black-framed glasses, and his partly bald, partly shaved head was the color of an old onion. Sitting in the otherwise deserted bar of the Bryant Park Hotel in midtown Manhattan, he might have been a solitude-loving fashion designer enjoying a bit of down time. In fact, he is our premier "Hollywood novelist," part of a celebrated lineage that runs from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Nathanael West, Budd Schulberg, Michael Tolkin and other witty, jaded observers of L.A.’s sun-dappled, soul-mottled, earthquake-rattled scene.

It was 11 o’clock on a Saturday morning in early October, and Wagner was in a calm, pensive mood. In novels such as Force Majeure and his acclaimed "Cellular Trilogy" — I’m Losing You, I’ll Let You Go and Still Holding — he has painted a minutely detailed portrait of a city filled with lunatic stars and lunatics who want to be stars. The humor is as black as Wagner’s jacket, and hospitals and disease crop up as frequently as in the pestilential pages of William Burroughs. Everyone is on drugs, or getting off them. Ativans and Percodans and Vicodins and Klonipins litter the pages. The sex is sick, even prosecutable. Waitresses are wacko, producers are perverts, and movie projects are mirages that draw the hapless closer and closer until they sink in the quicksand of their own delusions. As the British novelist Will Self blurbed, Wagner’s satires make all other Hollywood satires "look Capraesque in their innocence."

213, 323, 310: Wagner's dead
cell phone collection

In contrast to his characters, the author himself seemed studiously sane. He oozed sincerity, used words like "tender" and "poignant" a lot, and said he wrote his novels from "a timeless place." But in an era when many people read fiction to get away from the hyped-up rhythms of contemporary life, Wagner’s novels plunge them right back into it. There is as much name-dropping in his books as in Entertainment Weekly. The first page of Still Holding, which is about Hollywood look-alikes, includes references to Drew Barrymore, Jack Black, Jay Leno and Sissy Spacek, not to mention the movie Star 80 and "a knockoff Hermès scarf."

The standard interpretation is that Wagner’s books are about hell, Hollywood style, a satanic entertainment kingdom run by "H.I.V.I.P.’s" and other assorted monsters who torture their assistants between yoga classes and betray their best friends whenever they have reason to, which is often. It’s a place where a screenwriter who’s adapted Gogol’s Dead Souls doesn’t leave his house for 15 years because he’s waiting for a call back from the studio. But of course it’s when he finally does leave that the trouble starts.

"I infect my work with madness, then let it settle," Wagner told me. "The story is infected by something — like in David Cronenberg’s films. My job is to be realistic and poetic at the same time, so that people have a sense of being transported somewhere else. I’m very sentimental at the same time as I’m very cold-hearted."

Wagner was in New York to promote Still Holding, the final installment of his trilogy, which had just been released in paperback. The strategy at Simon & Schuster, his publisher, was to reacquaint booksellers and the public with his work a few months before the publication of his new novel, The Chrysanthemum Palace (which arrives in bookstores next week).

A few nights earlier, he had read from Still Holding at the Barnes & Noble in Astor Place. Given that the reading ended only a few minutes before the first presidential debate between Bush and Kerry began, it was surprisingly well attended. There were a few hip types in the audience, but for the most part it was a generic urban mix: male, female, young, middle-aged, old, more or less what you would have found in any section of the store.

Standing next to a bookcase crammed with self-help titles — Stress Management for Dummies, Changing Course, Doing Good for Goodness’ Sake — Wagner spoke into a microphone with practiced ease. He disputed that his books were really satires, since satire exaggerates and his books (he said) don’t — a disturbing thought. Instead, he insisted on the emotional core of Still Holding, and said that the novel was concerned with death and greatly influenced by The Tibetan Book of the Dead. "I’m not a Buddhist," he said, "but it forced me, almost as a teacher would, a monk, to go to places that I’m due to go to now at 50. So it’s not the book of a 30-year-old or 40-year-old. It’s 50. For me it’s a big turning point in terms of the ability to look at death with one’s eyes open, and hopefully" — Wagner lowered his voice playfully — "be humorous about it."

Wagner is a natural performer, and the audience at Barnes & Noble chuckled whenever he dropped a phrase ("Jackass DVD on the plasma") juicily redolent of decadent Hollywood pop culture. The final scene he read from the novel was about Kit Lightfoot, the book’s movie-star hero, who is about to play the leading role in a Spike Jonze movie about a famous actor who is set to play a retarded man when a car crash leaves him "neurologically impaired." But then — in real life — a fan, enraged when Kit refuses to autograph his girlfriend’s breasts, breaks a wine bottle over his head, putting Kit into a coma.

Assembled at Cedars-Sinai Hospital (a place of almost mystical significance in the Wagner oeuvre) are Kit’s agent, his lawyer, various actor buddies and the real-life director Darren Aronofsky. (One of the mysteries of Wagner’s fiction is how he has been able to place real people in his books without getting sued.) They are wondering if Kit will ever work again and quibbling among themselves. Wagner was not only willing to do all the voices, he relished the task. As he read it, it was evident that he found his characters grotesque, but lovable, and he bellowed every italicized word into the microphone as if he had morphed into some demented Tinseltown agent himself:

"Jesus," said a manager, with sudden emotion. "Has anything like this ever happened before? Has a major film star ever been attacked?"

"Sharon Tate," said the publicist.

"I’m sorry, but Sharon Tate was not a major star!"

I’m a native son, and the East Coast is almost a foreign place to me," Wagner said when I saw him two months later in Santa Monica. It was a stunning December day, temperature in the high 70s, the sky immaculate blue, and Wagner looked thoroughly at ease. In New York, it was as if a little cloud of introspection had been hanging over his head. Here, on familiar turf, he felt free, and his body language was ebullient. "We hope you’re wearing sunblock with that," he remarked to a bare-bellied female Santa Claus who was roller skating in front of the Casa del Mar Hotel. More Santa Claus impersonators, dozens of them, were gathering further down the boardwalk, protesting something. It might have been a scene from one of his own novels.

L.A., and particularly Hollywood, is a tricky place to write about because of its overwhelming association with film. Not the Word, but the Image. "It’s a hard nut to crack," Wagner told me over a late breakfast at Shutters on the Beach, "because there’s so much cliché here. I mean, how in the world do you write about an agent? How do you write about a producer?"

This is how Wagner did it in I’m Losing You.

"Hey, cunt."

"I’m sorry?"

That was Taj, the relatively new Assistant.

"What happened to the Dead Souls coverage?"

"What did you call me?"

Shortish hair in tight curls. The kind of preppie skin that mottled pink when he blushed or got cold or evinced outrage. Fear quickly soured his breath.

"A gaping, shit-contaminated hole."

You’d think, given the way he writes about them, that anyone even remotely connected to the motion-picture industry would head for the exit the moment a black-clad gentleman with a shaved head and three days’ stubble walked into the room. But Wagner claims that he is not really "on anyone’s radar," that most people in Hollywood don’t read anyway, and therefore his books go largely unnoticed by the very people he’s writing about.

The novelist Bret Easton Ellis, who’s a friend of Wagner’s, finds this explanation credible. "Bruce’s books really aren’t easy reads, and you have to have a pretty sophisticated sensibility to get what he’s doing, so where does that leave you with Hollywood?" he asked sarcastically when reached by phone. "Who is on their radar? What novelists are they paying attention to?"

Wagner’s novels sell more on the East Coast than they do on the West. When I’m Losing You was published, he received a career-making review from John Updike in The New Yorker. ("Bruce Wagner knows his Hollywood, and writes like a wizard.") But closer to home, critics have often been tough on him. "Bruce Wagner’s fiction reads like pornography for California-haters," noted the book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, David Kipen, who is an admirer, nonetheless. "All their cozy East Coast prejudices, all their suspicions about ‘Lotusland’ come echoing back to them in Wagner’s fiction, confirmed and exaggerated." It’s not surprising, then, that probably the worst review he ever received was in the L.A. Times.

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