I Met Someone by Bruce Wagner; Blue Rider Press, $27.95
Known for penning such gems as the PEN/Faulkner award finalist The Chrysanthemum Palace; Wild Palms, which became a popular miniseries; and the David Cronenberg-directed Maps to the Stars, actor, screenwriter, director, producer, and novelist Bruce Wagner excels at skewering and satirizing the Hollywood lifestyle and those who revel in it. His new novel I Met Someone, while flustered and haphazard, is a for-fans-only effort primed for those with an acquired taste for name-dropping and excessive exposition.
At the core of his latest book is the story of Dusty Wilding, a multi-Academy-Award-winning actress who risked the longevity of her career by coming out as a lesbian. When her wife Allegra miscarries their much-anticipated baby, Dusty embarks on a desperate search to find and reunite with Aurora, the daughter she gave up for adoption while a misled teenager. It takes wading through a good first third of the book for the plot to kick in after dinner parties where peyote, "totally life-changing" Burning Man attendance, and entheogenic ayahuasca rituals are randomly discussed with great if artificially induced enthusiasm (and in italics). There's mystery and intrigue in the other two-thirds of the novel, but much of that comes submerged in a stew of meandering musings.
As if to prepare readers for the long ride ahead, Wagner describes his main character as "a 53-year-old, makeup-free movie morningstar, beatific and unadorned, half-astonished she'd survived, fragile and unbreakable, childlike, ancient, with lustrous, hard-core, wide-open heart �" redoubtable warrior-queen and doubting heroine." Seemingly unedited passages like these overheatedly address such issues as Allegra's post-miscarriage quasi-suicidal "amniotic misery," cheating lesbians, and modern-day police detectives who embody a newfound "colorful rep as snappy dressers, men's men who weren't afraid of a little bling."
Wagner, true to form, remains chatty but freeform in his literary expression. Dusty and her plot go on the back burner in favor of bringing some overwritten monologues, run-on sentences, nonsensical wordplay, and an exhaustive menagerie of A-list celebrity mentions to their boiling points. What Wagner does do well is also on fine display. He is masterful in the art of acerbically descriptive glorification: a talk show host is armed with a "dead whore smile," "coasting" on 25 mg of Trazodone HCI. These quips will bring a smirk to even the neophyte Wagner reader.
Wagner's latest is again an overpolished rhinestone of indulgent fiction about the self-absorbed, banal, TMZ-sensationalistic nature of Hollywood and the celebrity way of life. It's a gilded, overcaffeinated, nearly-400-page insinuation of the notion that "privacy wasn't dead, reality was �" but sure was tough to kill."
Fans don't read Wagner for introspection. If the story doesn't grab you, there are Kardashians and pop-up supermodel Gigi Hadid, West Hollywood doyenne Lisa Vanderpump, Kendall and Kylie, and "fallen" cougars to keep your eyes open. Some readers will find this novel a mess of plot and indulgent word vomit. Others will revel in the splendor of the Bruce Wagner experience, which resembles spending an afternoon downing iced quad espressos with a manic, gossipy reality-show addict.