At first glance, writer Bruce Wagner projects a disarming image of Hollywood cool: tall, slender, dressed immaculately and entirely in black, wearing severe black horn-rimmed glasses and an expression set at a distant remove from his surroundings.
Instead, he’s warm and friendly, drinking a latte on L.A.’s Larchmont Boulevard on the publication eve of Dead Stars, his seventh novel (Penguin/Blue Rider Press) set in the city that Wagner frequently writes about. It’s where he grew up, dropping out of Beverly Hills High School in his junior year to work in bookstores, drive an ambulance, and hire on as a limousine driver for the Beverly Hills Hotel before marrying actress Rebecca De Mornay in 1989. By the time they divorced, Wagner was being published. Force Majeure, his first novel, was published in 1991 by Random House, and his career as a screenwriter and novelist took off. His novel Still Holding was a New York Times Notable Book; his essays and op-ed pieces have appeared in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Art Forum.
The cast of characters in Dead Stars blends the real--Michael Douglas, searching for meaning during his cancer remission; his wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones; and the porn star Montana (“Chippy D”) Fishburne, daughter of actor Laurence Fishburne--with the fictional, who include 13-year-old Telma, the world’s youngest breast cancer survivor; Reeyona, a pregnant teen mom who auditions for online porn so she can afford to move out of her mother’s house; and Tom-Tom, a singer and drug dealer voted off American Idol for creating a fictional hard-luck story. “Dead Stars is about porn culture,” says Wagner. “By that I mean the celebration of reality in a tabloid sense, and the ensuing disposability of formal narrative. Is it still possible to tell stories in a culture that no longer has an attention span? Dead Stars reflects much of what’s happening culturally, in terms of the disposability of it, the lack of gravitas.”
It’s been six years since Memorial (Simon & Schuster), Wagner’s last novel, was published. “What happened was I was working on a very large novel called The Jungle Book,” Wagner says. “I was traveling cross-country to research it, and it began to swallow me up.” The unpublished novel reached 3,000 pages, and all the while Wagner was dealing with a variety of drug addictions. “The Jungle Book was too ambitious, and I collapsed under the weight of it. I thought it was going to be the book of my life, but it was apparent that it was becoming the book of my death. I wound up in the hospital, in rehab.” Wagner was there for two months, and later began writing Dead Stars. “When I got out of rehab I began to wake up each morning with a Christopher Hitchens–like rage, and that translated into a novel that is very much about a culture that is dying and being reborn as something else.”
Wagner used to balk at the description of himself as a satirist, but now he thinks it’s accurate. “But there’s a distinction,” he explains. “When we think of satirists we think of those who exaggerate in order to expose or throw light on a truth. I don’t think I exaggerate, and that’s the difference between me and someone like Jonathan Swift, for instance.” Wagner’s writing, particularly in Dead Stars, reflects the voice of someone angry and almost zealously exposing the hypocrisies in personalities and cultural trends, particularly in Hollywood. “But I’ve tried not to be judgmental, because there’s nothing more boring than someone trying to send up the grotesque aspects of the world we live in,” he says, “There’s so much beauty and spirituality in this life.”
Although he refers to Hollywood as “kind of the garbage term of the zeitgeist of the national world culture,” Wagner still likes living here with his wife, Laura Peterson, in Santa Monica. “I’m an incessant observer of human nature. Hollywood is a backdrop, a milieu, but it doesn’t come first for me. Even though it sounds like a Saturday Night Live sketch, the traffic here is debilitating. Essentially, rush hour is now from 7:15 a.m. until 9 at night,” he says, laughing. “But you have good days and bad days, like everywhere else.”
Wagner views the changes in the book industry as exciting. “I never want to be someone that has the view that things are terrible now,” he says. “A kind of paranoia might overtake a writer, but it’s not about being ripped off or having content stolen. It’s more the idea that we might be losing our need or desire for storytelling.” Wagner concedes that American culture is now obsessed with fame to the point of absurdity. “I would amend Warhol’s dictum and say that in the future everyone will be famous, or famous for having been famous, or famous for being about to be famous. I’d cut the ‘for fifteen minutes’ part.”
