Memorial by Bruce Wagner: Travel from Ridiculous Los Angeles to Sublime India

All the pistons of a tuned-up contemporary novel fire in precision in Memorial by Bruce Wagner. It is fueled by a volatile mixture of comedy and tragedy, realism and allegory, superficiality and depth. Memorial is a fleeting book, but it leaves its mark.

Steering Wagner's story is a family that, owing to separation and disinterest, doesn't even know it is a family. Marjorie is a sweet and trusting senior citizen who has unfathomable horror befall her. Ray is her ex-husband who thinks life's wrongs can be righted by hosting steak dinners at the Pacific Dining Car. Their daughter Joan is a trendy architect who competes to design a billionaire's memorial and gets another remembrance altogether. Chester is the son who slides into prescription pain killer addiction due to the injury sustained while being "punked" on a reality show.

The only meaningful element these marginally related people share is a coincidental, mystic and redemptive connection to India. Marjorie visited the country as a young girl and Wagner lyrically tells us it was "the very best time of her life, a time she was convinced had made her the person she was today, suffusing her disposition, her entire existence, with a kind of diurnal poetry and peasant's optimism, a time that allowed her to suffer all life's vicissitudes, coloring her day-by-day mood with the lingering incense of nonsectarian spiritual hopefulness."

Wagner's literary style is to occupy his characters and speak in their voices, which often involves indulgent but clever word association puns that tumble about like freewheeling inner thoughts. He enjoys turning motif conventions on their head. Water, which in traditional literature symbolizes life, is the source of death in Memorial, whether it is in the form of a tsunami or amniotic fluid. Wagner refers to it as the "life-sustaining purveyor of death." His talent is so pervasive, he can establish character simply by revealing possessions, bringing to mind Gatsby's display of his shirts to Daisy Buchanan. Here is Joan packing for an overnight trip: "She deliberately hadn't packed the vintage hippo-hide Velextra suitcase he bought her at auction, the one that belonged to Maria Callas... So she got out her voluminous Prada duffel and threw in a favorite Miss Sixty smock, the Bless skirtrousers, the Loro Piano cashmere hoodie and Van Steenbergen shift, the Judith Lieber minaudiè re, the Narciso Rodriguez devil-red housecoat, the Marc Jacobs silk organza ruffle skirt and Marni taffeta slip, along with Louboutin espadrilles, Comme des Garç ons ballet flats, Manolo zebra-print pony slingbacks..." and so on.

The more you know about celebrity architects (the so-called starchitects), the more there is to derive from Memorial. Wagner slaps them around with alternating grim and merry pranksterism. Renzo Piano, for example, becomes "Ratso Renzo." Joan's jealous rants against starchitect Zaha Hadid are outrageously funny, yet so blisteringly insulting that it is amazing the publisher's defamation attorneys allowed them. Wagner is also a connoisseur of West Los Angeles culture. For instance, Chester is "rent-challenged," lives in West Hollywood and his landlord is Don Knotts' daughter. At the oh-so-chic Venice restaurant called Axe, he orders a Coke and is treated like "he asked for yak urine. (Which they probably did have.)" The dog of Marjorie's neighbor passes rigorous "peer review" to get "accepted" into the exclusive day care facility where Reese Witherspoon keeps her canines. Beyond Westside L.A.'s pretension and fame worship, Wagner extols the genuine cool factor of seeing films at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, browsing for books at Dutton's Brentwood and buying records at Amoeba Music in Hollywood.

Wagner's firm grasp of Los Angeles popular culture has made him part of it and something of an icon himself. Fellow writer Jonathan Lethem conjures him, or "someone who might be Bruce Wagner," as a celebrity sighted at a cutting edge party scene in his current west coast novel, You Don't Love Me Yet (Doubleday). Perhaps because Wagner has such a keen understanding of transience, he knows the value of permanence. The conspicuous billionaire patron in Memorial wants to construct an eternal monument in a vast open field and is vaguely aware that only something allegoric will do the job. "The thousand crosses in Berlin," he complains, "Oklahoma, the 168 Chairs, the 168 Seconds of Silence. I hate that--literal shit." At the peak of their creative collaboration, Joan comes to the realization that the perfect memorial is the vast natural field. "He should just leave it like this, she thought. Open, without markings. Anything human would ruin it." One of the rare real world examples of this principle was exercised recently by the Amish community in Pennsylvania when the decision was made to tear down a schoolhouse in which five young girls were shot and five others were injured by a gunman who then killed himself. They simply and eloquently seeded the scarred patch of earth with grass. It is a wonderful moment when the acquisitive architect with the Prada duffle and Manolo slingbacks lets go of ego and embraces instead the architectural and spiritual mantra that Less Is More. It is the single most difficult lesson for all who populate Memorial to learn, but learn they do.

Memorial
By Bruce Wagner
Simon & Schuster, 509 pages, $26
ISBN 0743272358