With a Dash of Dead Ringers For Texture

Brendan Bernhard (LA Weekly) profiles Bruce Wagner, "our premier 'Hollywood novelist,'" who reveals his narrative strategy in its broadest terms:

"I infect my work with madness, then let it settle. The story is infected by something--like in David Cronenberg’s films. My job is to be realistic and poetic at the same time, so that people have a sense of being transported somewhere else. I’m very sentimental at the same time as I’m very cold-hearted."

As a fan of both Wagner and Cronenberg, I'd say that's about right: somewhere between Shivers and eXistenZ. The article's fairly long, but frequently fascinating. There's a particularly interesting section early in about how, according to Wagner, "most people in Hollywood don’t read anyway, and therefore his books go largely unnoticed by the very people he’s writing about," while the West Coast literati seem to know him but not necessarily love him: "Nor did he make it into the 1,000-page anthology Writing Los Angeles, published by the Library of America in 2002, which did find room for lesser-known contemporaries such as Lynell George, Carol Muske, Rubén Martinez and D.J. Waldie." We also learn that he's friends with both Dana Delaney and James Ellroy...which makes me smile to think of Mad Dog pestering Wagner for an introduction, although I'm sure it didn't happen that way in real life.

photo: Debra DiPaolo