James Ellroy Still Holding is Bruce Wagner's masterpiece.
Description
If there's an even darker side to Hollywood than the one America is familiar with, Bruce Wagner has found it. A twenty-first-century Nathanael West, he has been hailed for his powerful prose, his Swiftian satire, and the scalpel-sharp wit that has, in each of his novels, dissected and sometimes disemboweled Hollywood excess.
Now, in his most ambitious book to date, Still Holding, the third in the Cellular Trilogy that began with I'm Losing You and I'll Let You Go, Wagner immerses readers in post-September 11 Hollywood, revealing as much rabid ambition, rampant narcissism, and unchecked mental illness as ever. It is a scabrous, epiphanic, sometimes horrifying portrait of an entangled community of legitimate stars, delusional wanna-bes, and psychosociopaths. Wagner infiltrates the gilded life of a superstar actor/sex symbol/practicing Buddhist, the compromised world of a young actress whose big break comes when she's hired to play a corpse on Six Feet Under, and the strange parallel universe of look-alikes -- an entire industry in which struggling actors are hired out for parties and conventions to play their famous counterparts. Alternately hilarious and heartfelt, ferocious and empathetic, Still Holding is Bruce Wagner's most expertly calibrated work.
Reviews
The Washington Post What Wagner does, nobody does better. He is the Nathanael West, the Budd Schulberg of our time, the go-to guy for closely observed novels about a sun-soaked hellhole that may or may not be a real place.
"Still Holding finds the Nabakov of New Age Angeleno life in the best form of his career - which is saying something...Probably because of the ghettoization of the Hollywood novel, Wager has never received the Franzen-like critical adulation that he deserves. Then again, he has never particularly sought celebrity; he has simply made it his own territory, with as much genius and ferocity as Faulkner applied to laying bare the gloriously unsavory humanity of Yoknapatawpha County."
-- Elle
"Wagner's ability to limn the mercurial ways of Hollywood is astonishing, and he...writes with a fiery grace...A brutal phantasmagoria on the pleasures and perils of the dream factory."
-- Kirkus Reviews
