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But I suppose the contrast caused the thought to rise. It's hard to believe that on the same planet there are people who make the best of things and are happy with what Pym called "small blameless comforts" and people who demand the best of things and aren't happy with even the most gargantuan of pleasures. Of course, both worlds are fictional-but, as the man said, just because it's fiction doesn't mean it isn't true. And of course I'm hopelessly middlebrow, middle-class, and middle of the road, but that doesn't mean my contempt for Wagner's characters is naive. He doesn't like them either.
That's the point, and the strength, of I'm Losing You (the title derives from car-phone conversations, endemic to Hollywood, that keep breaking up): the author's own apparent feeling of revulsion is neatly transferred to the reader through his savagely witty satire.
Its weaknesses are that it sprawls-to no good purpose-and its large cast of crazily interconnecting characters is hard to keep straight. The fact that it is not actually about anything, however, should not be considered a weakness: it's "about' various people who are, or hope to be, in movies, and the lengths to which they will go and the depths to which they will sink to fulfill their raging ambitions. Except they wouldn't think of them as lengths or depths, but as opportunities.
Amoral is too pale a word to describe these lives. They inhabit a world totally without anchor or compass. I'm Losing You is, as probably every review will remark, The Day of the Locust updated. At one point a character makes reference to the 1935 film, Dante's Inferno. Reading this is a bit like viewing that. It, too, is filled with souls wailing in anguish and not knowing that their every action contributes to further anguish.
Externally, however, wailing is not what they are doing. Effecting various forms of sexual congress would be a delicate way of describing what they are doing externally, some of their high jinks being outside even the lax bounds of what today is considered either legal or moral. An actress, Oberon Mall, for instance, wants to make a movie in which she has sex with an entire family -- something, indeed, that she wants to do in her own life. I told you this wasn't Andy Hardy.
If the novel's theme can be said to be the destructiveness of ambition, its leitmotif is homosexuality and AIDS. All the characters, gay or straight, constantly make pottymouth jokes and puns about homosexuality (infected influential figures are known as H.I.V.I.P.s). All of them know at least one person dying of AIDS.
They all tool around discussing deals on car phones. These phone conversations that rain down, static-y and interrupted, upon the automobiles of Los Angeles are like the lives of the drivers -- isolated, deadening, and unable to make connections. Severin Welch, a retired screenwriter, monitors and records the conversations off a scanner with the idea of stitching them together into "one hell of an American Quilt."
There are grace notes. The most touching scene is that of a taharah, the Orthodox Jewish ritual washing of a dead body, in this case that of a pre-teen girl murdered by a young man driven insane by the failure of his promiscuity to win him the filmland advancement he had hoped for.
In the end, things -- in that tried, trite, and true phrase -- turn out for the best, or at least the best they can. Perry Needham Howe, an obscenely rich mogul who thinks he is dying of cancer, goes on a mad pursuit of the perfect watch, presumably to keep track of the little time he has left. When it turns out that the disease is in remission, his pursuit devolves into his recognition of the miracle of his dead son. Before his death, the boy had developed into a savant capable of telling any date in the past or future, even that of his own death. A human chronograph, keeping track of all time.
"How's that for closure?" the author asks in the final sentence.
Not bad, not bad at all.
Roger Miller is a freelance writer in Grafton, Wisconsin. He can be reached at roger_miller@bookpage.com
©1996, ProMotion, inc.