Customer Reviews

Force Majeure

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Bruce Wagner is a screenwriter and director with a swirling disturbing perception of the subworld that is Hollywoodland. When writing the seminal though hardly remembered techrevolution packaged as a TV miniseries, Wild Palms, he locked himself away in the old 20s glamour haunt, the Chateau Marmont friend William Gibson has reported, and filled the room with books - not to read, but just to inspire or invoke in the darn thing. I think there were probably a lot of candles too.

Force Majeure is somewhat more contemporary than the near future world of Wild Palms, but it is spilling over with the same mundane paranoia that seeps through Hollywood. Bud Wiggins, a Willy Loman as screenwriter bumps and stumbles through a world and narrative that is part Day of the Locusts, part Terry Southern's Blue Movie. You feel like there's always a conspiracy around the corner, but its only showbiz. Force Majeure whips together trippyness, struggle, pop, and pornography in a way that makes me think of Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers, though the books are not similar otherwise.

Finally, this is a portrait of Hollywood. There's a beginning rule of screenwriting that says Hollywood is the only place where you can make a living on failure. And that's if you're really lucky. Force Majeure embodies that notion.

I bought this book on the recommendation of a friend and found it profoundly dissapointing. The most annoying thing about it is the way that the plot is packed with red herrings: mysterious, unnamed characters who seem to be crucial but never develop into anybody interesting or meaningful and instead just vanish; sub-plots that end suddenly and uninterestingly, as though the writer forgot where he was going and decided to change direction mid-stream; and tons of fascinating "minor" characters who are either conveniently knocked off or commit suicide before they risk stealing the scene from the stunningly boring, self-indulgent, predictable narrator. Wagner tries to get away with this by referencing "Don Quixote," a novel famous for its rambling, meandering, tangential, apparently endless narrative. This unbelievably egocentric comparison might work for some but I stopped reading "Don Quixote" long before that book ended and I was tempted to do the same with this one.

I thought this would be a "fun romp" through Hollywood, with lots of name-dropping, gossipy, juicy stuff, but the truth is it is way too ambitious--trying to be a combination of Philip Roth and Cervantes. Okay, yes, it is his first, but unfortunately it will, for me anyway, be the last Wagner I ever pick up.