Screenwriter Bruce Wagner, writer for the "Nightmare on Elm Street" series and of the TV mini-series "White Palms," has set his second novel, like his first, Force Majeure, in the hip world with which he is intimate--Hollywood, as in Babylon writ large, a world of dreams shattered or grotesquely corrupted. Arranged in short sections, each written from the viewpoint of some 20 alternating characters, without a clear plot line, the book's style is as disorienting as the drug-dazed sexually abusive lifestyles of the players. Wagner pulls no punches in his descriptions of these pitiable losers and vile winners; indeed parts of the book are hard on the stomach. The book is unrelentingly powerful, and occasionally downright revolting.


From Publishers Weekly
More soap opera than satire, screenwriter Wagner's wildly uneven second novel (after Force Majeure) presents a wide spectrum of loosely connected characters and situations. Set in contemporary Hollywood, the novel's ensemble cast ranges from budding movie stars and high-powered agents to ambitious masseuses and a New Age homeless woman, with such real-life celebrities as Alec Baldwin and Richard Dreyfuss making cameo appearances. Disparate tales are partially connected through several Hollywood dynasties that interact throughout the novel as Wagner performs a ruthless and occasionally quite sharp dissection of Hollywood's caste system. He is at his best when delineating the hierarchy and competitive paranoia of Tinseltown, and there are occasional moments of pathos in his presentation of the psychic toll of ambition. But many of Wagner's characters are stock types who never rise above cliche, and much of his humor is correspondingly obvious: it takes more than contempt for one's characters to make an effective satirist. He also takes the low art of name-dropping to new depths, with such obsessive cataloging of celebrities and pop-culture icons that the book begins to read more like a fan magazine than a novel. Likewise the vast cast and lack of central incident, reminiscent of Robert Altman's film Short Cuts, which are unredeemed by any overarching vision. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
L.A. bete 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 here?except perhaps smart-ass social critic novelists?and 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, NYPLCopyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Anita Gates
The author's achievement is that almost every character is fascinating, no matter how hideous.... I'm Losing You may stop short of brilliance, but it's pretty fabulous and its message is trenchant.


The New Yorker, John Updike
Wagner knows his Hollywood, and writes like a wizard . . . His prose, out from under the constraints of script manufacture, writhes and coruscates.


From Booklist
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. Brian Kenney


From Kirkus Reviews
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 lust--and 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   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. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

It is a story with all the sprawling vastness of Los Angeles and the "bigger than life" ferocity of Hollywood. It is a land of H.I.V.I.P.'s, porn stars in love, scheming dermatologists, cell-phone conversations that never quite connect, and dying men who wear million-dollar watches. It is a place of celebrity chore-whores and masseurs, of syphilitic cantors, traitorous shrinks, and sightless children - a place where a great movie star, paralyzed from a botched root canal, lies helplessly while orderlies sell tickets to her nakedness. It is a business where the shyster producer of a hit dog movie hopes his next project will be a remake of Gogol's Dead Souls - this time around featuring Alec Baldwin as a burnt-out salesman hustling life insurance to persons with AIDS. It's a town where a mad agent plays God to a homeless woman - an affair that ends in sodomy, pedophilia, and murder. It is Hollywood, cordless, unplugged, and exposed, where the two most heard comments are "I'll let you go" and "Hold on...I'm losing you..." With a sensibility that calls to mind Nashville (set in Hollywood, as told by Virgil) - from the prying eyes of Hard Copy to the babbling cellular matrix of darkest night - Bruce Wagner charts the morbidity and mortality of a culture's current affairs. I'm Losing You depicts the national obsession with fame and fortune - truth and consequence - as never before.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

More soap opera than satire, screenwriter Wagner's wildly uneven second novel (after Force Majeure) presents a wide spectrum of loosely connected characters and situations. Set in contemporary Hollywood, the novel's ensemble cast ranges from budding movie stars and high-powered agents to ambitious masseuses and a New Age homeless woman, with such real-life celebrities as Alec Baldwin and Richard Dreyfuss making cameo appearances. Disparate tales are partially connected through several Hollywood dynasties that interact throughout the novel as Wagner performs a ruthless and occasionally quite sharp dissection of Hollywood's caste system. He is at his best when delineating the hierarchy and competitive paranoia of Tinseltown, and there are occasional moments of pathos in his presentation of the psychic toll of ambition. But many of Wagner's characters are stock types who never rise above clich, and much of his humor is correspondingly obvious: it takes more than contempt for one's characters to make an effective satirist. He also takes the low art of name-dropping to new depths, with such obsessive cataloging of celebrities and pop-culture icons that the book begins to read more like a fan magazine than a novel. Likewise the vast cast and lack of central incident, reminiscent of Robert Altman's film Short Cuts, which are unredeemed by any overarching vision. (July)

Library Journal

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

John Updike

Bruce Wagner knows his Hollywood, and writes like a wizard. -- The New Yorker

Walter Kirn

The year's best book. -- New York Magazine

Dwight Garner

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. --SalonRead all 6 "From The Critics" >

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