Monumental Delusions
An L.A. family grasps for happiness in all the wrong ways.
MEMORIAL
A Novel
By Bruce Wagner
Simon & Schuster. 528 pp. $26
Is it really fair to keep calling Bruce Wagner a "Hollywood satirist?" The 52-year-old author has lived almost his entire life in Los Angeles, where he sets all of his books. He tends to favor as characters the self-absorbed actors, agents, producers, screenwriters and hangers-on that constitute the city's star-making machinery. But in his new novel, Memorial , Wagner has moved away from Hollywood solipsism to create a poignant family saga. Though he has left in more than enough bile to appease those who delight in his elegantly constructed takedowns of celebrity culture, there's also a great deal of sympathy to be found in this story of a sadly disaggregated Los Angeles family.
Marjorie Herlihy, recently widowed from her second husband and unquestionably decent, lives alone in the suburbs just a few miles (but many worlds) away from her two grown children. She buys lottery tickets and dreams of visiting India. Daughter Joan, an architect consumed by jealousy of celebrity architects such as Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry, likes to binge on self-doubt. Joan's brother, Chester, is a 41-year-old location scout living hand-to-mouth in a West Hollywood garage apartment owned by the late Don Knotts's daughter. (No showbizzy detail is too picayune for Wagner.) Chester self-medicates, drives a Taurus with 283,000 miles on it and tells himself that he's on the road to becoming a producer. All three pause to wonder, from time to time, whatever became of Ray, the husband and father who walked out of their lives more than 30 years ago without saying goodbye.
He's living nearby, just down the 405 freeway in the hardscrabble industrial exurbs. Ray wonders about them, too. Memorial is, among other things, the story of how even the most withered and fragile family ties are mysteriously capable of annihilating selfishness, and how people -- even the nasty, neurotic types one finds in a Bruce Wagner novel -- can change.
Before any of that happens, however, Wagner has each member of the family undergo his or her own personal trial. Joan is on the shortlist to create a memorial commissioned by a Napa Valley billionaire in honor of his brother and sister-in-law, who have perished in a tsunami. The stress of the career-making contest has amplified her already sizable insecurity, and in her addled state she can't see how sleeping with the client might not be such a good idea. Chester, meanwhile, has injured himself while playing the role of unwitting dupe on a reality TV show. Between popping Percocet and lusting after his best friend's girlfriend, he considers the merits of filing a massive lawsuit against the show's producers. Across town, Marjorie has fallen for a lottery scam designed to drain her savings. And down the highway, 76-year-old Ray has barely had time to recuperate from injuries sustained during a mistaken police break-in when his girlfriend announces that she's pregnant. The surprising news makes Ray wonder if the ACLU attorney advising him to sue the police might be on to something.
What binds these four together, other than their commingled DNA, is that each believes to some degree in the promise of the big payoff as the solution to all problems. Whether it's through lawsuits, lotteries or once-in-a-lifetime commissions, they have faith that wealth and fame can fill the void in their lives where a parent or a lover or a child should be.
Wagner, who has lived in India on and off for the last several years, has apparently soaked up enough Vedic philosophy to have an opinion on the matter. Fans of the author's famously vituperative riffs won't be disappointed with Memorial (he savages Larry King, Charlie Rose and several winners of the Pritzker architecture prize), but they may be surprised to see how tenderly he tries, this time, to steer his creations away from the mirages of the material world and toward inner peace.
Before the novel is over, everyone in the family will have a new and startlingly clear definition of suffering. Chester is one of the first to discover the horrible truth: "The entire culture was geared toward intractable pain: every magazine, every paper and electronic news show featured chronicles of incurable, idiopathic, undiagnosable agony. There was a lot Chess was suddenly learning about, and none of it was wonderful: like how a body in constant anguish somehow rewired itself neurologically, becoming addicted to the pain itself , which made the cycle nearly impossible to break."
For a West Hollywood guy, that's a very Eastern way of diagnosing the human condition. When Chester finally leaves L.A. to embark on his own spiritual journey, we can't help but wonder if he's taken the old, mean-spirited Bruce Wagner with him. ·
Jeff Turrentine is a writer in Austin, Tex.
