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Imagine being the best in your field but operating in a community that is completely uninterested. A five-star vegan chef, say, but in the middle of Nebraska. Then you'd know what it is like to be Bruce Wagner.
Wagner is a brilliant comic novelist whose canvas is Hollywood. No one sends up Tinseltown vanity with such razor-eyed psychological acuity and sharp satiric elbows. But with Tom Cruise jumping on couches and studio heads caught in a wiretapping scandal, he can't feel there's much of a challenge in parodying the City of Angels.
Never mind the reality that in L.A., the novelist's social status is a couple of notches below some guy with a co-writing credit on Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. Memorial is Wagner's Big Novel, his attempt to transcend Tinseltown with a sweeping family epic that's L.A.-based but outside the studio system.
The members of the Herlihy clan live within miles of one another, but they might as well be on separate planets. Joan is an architect hoping that a commission for a billionaire's tsunami memorial will make her a famous "starchitect" profiled in glossy magazines. Her brother Chester is a failed location scout who descends into depression, pills and a lawsuit after a reality-TV prank goes awry.
Their mother, Marjorie, has come into an unexpected seven-figure insurance windfall after the death of her husband, which makes her a target for an elaborate con. None of them realizes that Marjorie's first husband, Ray, the estranged father of Joan and Chester, lives nearby -- or that he suffered a mild heart attack after the LAPD busted through his door in a case of mistaken identity.
If the painkillers, fading parents and get-rich-quick schemes sound familiar, well, Memorial can't seem to shake the shadow of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections.
The trouble is that, as nuanced as Wagner's four portraits are, the transformative moment for each is gimmicky and a little too similar. Marjorie is swindled out of hundreds of thousands, but the others, predictably, hit pay dirt. Joan gets pregnant with the billionaire's baby and walks away with $20 million. Ray settles with the city for six figures, and Chester does nearly as well with Friday Night Frights. Even as he tries to leave the dream factory behind, Wagner can't avoid the superficial Hollywood ending.
There's enough humanity and absurdity in Memorial -- especially in the sections on Joan and Marjorie -- to make it clear that Wagner has Big Novel talent to go along with his savage wit.
If Memorial trips on its own ambitions, well, that happens all the time in Hollywood.
Wagner might not have a Corrections of his own until he visits Nebraska.
Memorial
By Bruce Wagner
Simon & Schuster, 507 pp., $26
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