Memorial: A Novel
[Signature]Reviewed byKurt AndersenLike Wagner's previous books,Memorialis set in a Los Angeles descended from Nathaniel West's and Joan Didion's but played for laughs as well as existential dread. It's an L.A. novel the wayShort CutsandCrashare L.A. movies: a set of loosely connected stories rather than a tight single narrative. Like Wagner's other books, too, it refers frequently—compulsively, even—to celebrities and includes passages of breathtaking viciousness about some of them.But because the heroine (and authorial stand-in), Joan Herlihy, is a high-end architect angling for a commission to design a billionaire's memorial to two American victims of the 2004 tsunami, the insidery trash talk is mainly about the stars of architecture and art. Richard Meier resembles "a well-heeled dentist, the type with something questionable on his hard drive," Daniel Libeskind is "a relentless pussywhipped kike in python boots and a Yohji trench," and Zaha Hadid has an "unkempt Fat Actress kohl-smeared gypsy-soprano" look that works for her.Despite the customary Wagnerian savagery and ultra-knowingness, however,Memorialis also earnest and even life-affirming, more likeI'll Let You Go(2002) than his purely comic novels. The main characters are the members of an ordinary middle-class family—Joan, her feckless older brother, their sweet mother and sweet runaway father. Three of the four are spectacularly victimized, but every one is also the recipient of a financial windfall, and achieves redemption—which amounts either to slightly overdetermined coincidence, or karma. India is a major leitmotif inMemorial, and although Wagner satirizesInStyleBuddhism (like he did in 2003'sStill Holding), he seems also to be taking Eastern religion seriously, as if to say: modern life is grotesque and funny as ever, but tenderness, honor and glimmers of wisdom are possible as well. Wagner is a very good writer, andMemorialis filled with beautifully observed turns of phrase ("a big-voltage desexed smile like a nun gone to rut"). His deconstruction of newscasters' special disingenuousness is virtuosic: "Wolf Blitzer talking about a plane that just went down... all necro'd out, breathy and methy and cockstiff for Death, a husky-voiced fratboy Peeper...." But the stylistic fanciness can also mask imprecision (an architectural design "grafting failed skinsketch onto gauzy somnambulist constructions"), and sometimes simply goes over the top—such as a 238-word-long sentence ("ambient absence, sounds and swellings, screams and shadows") about sex. His weakness for puns ("natal attractions," "Restoril in peace," "Hello, Dalai!") is... a weakness. But this is an ambitious, engaging, satisfying book. While his fans will find all the demonic intelligence and fun they expect,Memorialmight also attract a new cohort of readers who want more than all-dark-comedy-all-the-time.(Sept.)Kurt Andersen's new novel,Heyday, will be published by Random House in March.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.