Big payoffs

BACK in the old days, you knew you’d made it when your name appeared in the crossword puzzle of a major newspaper. Today, that high-water mark is mention in a Bruce Wagner novel. The author of the well-known “cellphone trilogy” (“I’m Losing You,” “I’ll Let You Go” and “Still Holding”) and last year’s “The Chrysanthemum Palace,” Wagner also writes for the screen and is about as close to being a Hollywood insider as a writer of complete sentences can get.

Wagner does not so much pepper his books with the names of the rich, famous and conspicuously aspirational as dump an entire spice rack onto the pages and leave the reader gasping for air. If Wagner put his name-drops in boldface, gossip column-style, his books would have the blocklike appearance of e-mails in which the sender is virtually screaming at the recipient: Larry King, Melissa Mathison, Stella McCartney!!!

All these names, and more, appear within the first 18 pages of Wagner’s new novel, “Memorial.” This actually shows great restraint by the author, who managed to mention five movie stars, an Hermes scarf and the Beverly Hills restaurant Crustacean on the first page of “Still Holding.” Some might want to read “Memorial” with a computer nearby so they can check the Internet for every elusive reference. But for all his status obsession, Wagner is not a snob. His references are designed less for public consumption (or humiliation) than as a way of letting us in on characters whose interior lives consist mainly of comparing themselves to others.

“Memorial” is a family story played out against a backdrop of high-tax-bracket seediness. The Herlihy family is reasonably well-heeled but splintered, alienated and desperate for something its members can’t quite put their fingers on. There’s Joan, a 37-year-old architect gunning for a billionaire’s high-profile commission of a memorial for victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami. Her 41-year-old brother, Chester (Chess), is a mostly out-of-work location scout who lives in West Hollywood in a converted garage owned by Don Knotts’ daughter, Karen.

Their mother, Marjorie, long ago abandoned by their father and recently widowed by her second husband, lives in Beverlywood. When not entertaining girlish dreams of visiting India, she measures her days in lottery tickets. Meanwhile, unbeknown to any of them, Raymond Rausch, the estranged husband and father, is living with Ghulpa, his 42-year-old Indian lover, in the city of Industry.

Early in the book, Chess thinks he’s scouting a location for his best friend, Maurie Levin, and finds himself facing a crazed, gun-wielding hillbilly. After hurling himself into a wall and urinating in his pants, he realizes that the whole episode is being filmed for a reality show called “Friday Night Frights.” Convinced he has nerve damage, Chess descends into a vortex of chronic pain that “migrated and stabbed, pulsed and tingled, and didn’t relent.” Soon, he’s addicted to painkillers and obsessed with suing “Friday Night Frights.”

When not lending money to her son or comforting her neighbor, whose King Charles Spaniel, Mr. Pahrump, has been diagnosed with cancer, Marjorie buys Lotto tickets from a neighborhood liquor store run by a family from Bombay. An eternal optimist, she proves an easy target for a band of sophisticated con artists, who tell her she’s won $6 million in a “shadow drawing of the New York State Lottery called The Blind Sister.” Sworn to secrecy by a “Special Programs Division” agent named Lucas Weyerhauser, Marjorie ultimately forks over her life savings and suffers a violent attack that foreshadows a more brutal incident to come.

Joan spends her days with her business partner (and sometime lover) Barbet, working on the entry for the tsunami memorial. In her spare time, she sleeps with a consul general from India, as well as the billionaire who commissioned the memorial. Although, in some ways, she’s the least sharply drawn character -- her architectural ambitions seem curiously dispassionate; she also doesn’t seem to have any friends she hasn’t bedded -- Joan is the one who pushes this freight train of a story to its destination by eventually seeking out the absent patriarch, Ray.

We meet Ray early on, but it isn’t immediately clear he’s part of the family. Once we learn this, however, we kind of like the family a little more. Sealed off from the bourgey detritus of show business references and “starchitects” (a favorite sobriquet of Wagner’s here; you can almost see him up at night registering the URL for starchitect.com), Ray’s sections of the novel are as palate-cleansing as they are mildly depressing. At 76, Ray is awaiting a cash settlement from Industry after police officers accidentally busted into his apartment, shot his dog and caused him to have a mild heart attack.

As Ray’s life begins to inch closer to that of his estranged family -- he chats up Marjorie’s neighbor in the veterinary office, who tells him about a yoga class called “Unleashing Your Inner Dog” -- the reader is allowed to step back from the frenzied din of name dropping and pill popping and wonder when these people are going to find each other. When Ghulpa announces she’s pregnant, shame haunts Ray about the family he deserted. “Leaving the kids behind nearly killed him,” Wagner writes. “The children were aloft.... He hated himself a long, long while.”

In the end, there is a reunion, but as in so much of Wagner’s work, the emotional drama is dwarfed by the flashy language and jaundiced noir. Some big things happen -- pregnancies, assaults, fires and deaths -- but the author often seems less interested in the events of the characters’ lives than he does in their rants about people and things that annoy them. He is capable of devoting as many words to descriptions of movies or TV shows as he is to the crucial, and sometimes harrowing, real-life events that shape the story. It’s as if the celebrity walk-on roles -- Cesar Millan, a.k.a. “The Dog Whisperer,” has a recurring part in the novel, as does Karen Knotts -- distract him from the business of his own characters.

There’s a real sense in “Memorial” that Wagner has tried to create a novel of ideas. The main characters are all seeking some sort of cash prize, be it a wrongful-injury settlement, lottery winnings or, in a particularly surprising (and duly brief) plot twist, a stratospheric paternity settlement. Wagner is clearly interested in the psychology of waiting for the big payoff. He’s also interested in India -- the novel was partially written there -- and inclusion of several Indian characters seems to signal his hope that we will get it, that we will see past the main players’ opportunism and lack of self-awareness and journey with them down some sort of exclusive back road to transcendence.

The problem is, even when Wagner tries to redeem this family, we’re not sure he’s serious. One of the characters does, finally, make a trip to India, but it’s full of the same effusive and manic language that would be produced by a trip down Wilshire Boulevard. And it’s not clear whether he’s asking us to buy the mysticism or still sending it up. In strict Wagnerian terms, though, it might not really matter. Although we read certain novels in hopes they’ll dig deep enough into the human condition to pose -- and maybe even answer -- some difficult questions about life, this is not the reason we read Bruce Wagner. He is less an anthropologist than an exceedingly witty voyeur. We read him not to study people but to spy on them. For all of “Memorial’s” intelligence-gathering about the family at its center, we’re left feeling as if we’ve merely been watching them from across a dark alley. *