Customer Reviews

Still Holding

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Like other reviewers here, I too felt disappointed by what I saw as the incongruity between the "hype" around this book and what it was delivering to me when I opened it. But then, some time around page 75 or so, the novel really began to coalesce and take off to a different level. It stopped sounding like Bret Easton Ellis and started to read like James Ellroy crossed with Gary Indiana by way of Joan Didion (how's that for a pedigree?). The flippant style and throwaway cast of celebrity walkons were hard to stomach until I caught on to what I think Wagner is doing here (i.e. demonstrating that in Los Angeles--or "Hollywood," rather--stars function sort of like geographic markers and place-holders, material coordinates providing the semblance of an orientation in a basically unstable, highly distorted, and unnatural social ecology). The book's major themes--hyperreality, celebrity obsession, mirroring and look-a-likes, the flawed pursuit of meaning or power through New Age mysticism and Eastern spirituality--resonated a great deal with Wagner's brilliant Wild Palms, a pop-cult phenomenon that still haunts me many years after its release. While this narrative may feel cynical and while some of its pages (particularly the sex scenes) are downright repulsive, the book is, quite simply, gripping and substantive even when it is hardest to take.

Since I've also trudged across this country by Amtrak, because of my own fear of flying, like a character in this terrific novel, I followed a friend's recommendation and bought this splendid and funny novel. What a treat. It examines Hollywood like a strong lethal and very funny (you laugh out loud) magnifying glass - following wonderful characters - including the self-absorbed life of a wannabe actress, who is a Drew Barrymore look-alike. It is all about the people who spend their lives scratching on the screen door of show business. Blocked like flies from ever getting close to the glamour of Hollywood they long for, we laugh and cry as they make their quest to find nirvana in this very nasty place. These fringe people are dealt with by Wagner with wry social commentary. This is a must read and I will read it again, when like poor Lisanne, I make my cross country journey east curled up in my sleeping car bedroom with this great book. Bravo to Mr. Wagner.

This book is wildly energetic, hilarious, disarmingly harsh, but above all heartbreaking and beautiful. For those who loved "I'm Losing You," Bruge Wagner once again delivers everything great about that book, this time with a much stronger, more satisfying story. "Still Holding" is a fantastic read. As with all great novels, I found myself torn reading this book-- I wanted to race through it and devour the crazy story, but at the same time slow down and re-read the gorgeous writing. Nobody does cruelty with a light touch better than Wagner. I highly recommend this book to anyone who not only wants to learn about the inner workings of Hollywood but also wants to see one of our great writers working at his peak.

What a performance! What a performer! The performance is Bruce Wagner's latest in his trilogy, and it's called STILL HOLDING; the performer is Bruce Wagner, a writer who at times seems to write with a chainsaw--as biting a satire of Hollywood, from stars to hangers on, look-alikes, delirious fans, as any other written; and yet also touching, in a tough way--Wagner is always tough and sweet at the same time; he clearly likes some of his wacky characters, including the Drew Barrymore look-alike, and--get this, Drew Barrymore herself, a neat trick Wagner pulls off. He also understands the fading star Kit, who turns to Yoga, whose fate it is to share it with a character he plays. The prose is furious--at times fragments, as if Wagner can't wait to move on--and neither can the reader, held captive from the first page. Comparison's? Cross the sharp-eyed but more delicate Waugh with Nathaniel West's even harsher visiton and you got it. Which is not to say that Wagner is not in a class by himself, an original writer who turns the Hollywood he clearly knows so well into his own canvas. Terrific novel, terrific writer.

I devoured this in a few hours - it was that much fun. Check it out if you're looking for laugh-out-loud excoriations of all that is Hollywood narcissism coupled with dead-on observations of the scene. Writer has a great eye, a great wit. Only very minor quibbles: perhaps too many multi-page soliloquies and plotting that became overwrought once or twice.

It's quite a feat for an author to manage to be both hilarious and disturbing, but my hat is off to Bruce Wagner for doing all that and more. I stumbled upon this novel by accident and couldn't put it down. Like many of us, the author seems to have a love-hate relationship with the entertainment industry, so this book is at once a scathing indictment and a mournful love sonnet to Hollywood. I can't imagine how he wrote something so complex and wonderfully affecting, but this book both made me laugh and really broke my heart. Wagner acknowledges and appreciates our fascination with Hollywood while at the same time really condemning it in a number of shocking ways that will really make you think. A wonderful read by a really gifted writer.

While the Buddhism line got a little long winded at times, the story itself was a thoroughly entertaining page turner. Sex, drugs, violence, money, religion... a lurid, twisted tale.

The Buddhist material is problematic, for Wagner fails to make us interested in it, and when poor Lisanne becomes obsessed with Buddhism, it stopped being even amusing and just became deranged. What a shame, because otherwsie STILL HOLDING is the best of the five novels by Bruce Wagner that I've read. Funny how time has made it sort of a period piece already, and it just came out 2 years ago! Time, that makes fools out of us all, has certainly played a trick on Mr. Wagner, for his book is a funny satire of the vacuous celebrity enjoyed by a top star couple obviously based on Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston.

Here they are called Kit Lightfoot and Viv Wembley. He comes off rather well, he's a honest person just trying to do a good job, but she's a rancid, egocentric and heartless user whose public happy face disguises her loathesome character inside. Gee, maybe Wagner does have some women issues? Anyhow of course the real life story (when Brad left Jen for Angelina Jolie and began collecting children of the globe with the latter) is far more compelling and weird than anything presented in this novel.

I most of all enjoyed the plot of the celebrity lookalikes, men and women with no special talent who nevertheless fulfill their own functions in the specialized, professional Hollywood world. There's a vicious killer who resembles Russell Crowe, and a sweet somewhat daffy ingenue called Becca who's a dead ringer for Drew Barrymore. At first I thought that the lookalikes should have rather different personalities than the stars they resemble--like the Russell Crowe one should not be so prone to violence--or the Drew Barrymore one should not share her lookalike's ditheriness and giggling fits. But hell, why not? The fun begins when Spike Jonze decides to make a movie written by Charlie Kaufman, set in the world of lookalikes, in which Jonze casts both lookalikes and, in minor roles, the stars they imitate. It sounds like a great film, one of the few fictional movies I'd actually pay money to see. Now only six more months till our next Bruce Wagner fix with the publication of THE MEMORIAL, can't wait!

The novel STILL HOLDING has to be considered in the context of Wagner's previous two novels: I'LL LET YOU GO and I'M LOSING YOU. What they add up to is that Wagner is an important novelist who is telling the truth about certain kinds of lives that are lived in Los Angeles and other parts of America in the early twenty first century. He can be entertaining, but he aspires to do more than that, and on the whole, despite the many flaws in his novels, he succeeds.

Wagner is immensely gifted--he can write superb prose, he creates fascinating characters, and he knows how to tell a story. He is also stretching, really stretching, to address life's most profound issues, and if he doesn't quite pull it off--as the understandable complaints from other reviewers about his depiction of Buddhism indicate--he is certainly artistically courageous.

Of course he has weaknesses--he over-writes: his prose often needs pruning and at least 30% of the overall length of his second and third novels are hard to justify; he has a serious anti-woman issue; his subject matter can be extreme--one often rises from a session reading a Wagner novel with a strong urge to take a long hot shower; and despite the fact that he obviously knows how to tell a story, his plots tend to flag severely in the middle of his novels, picking up (but not always) in the last 25%.

This complex of strengths and weaknesses means that Wagner is not all that accessible, which is why some of his less committed readers are disappointed. But he is trying to tell us something real about the times in which we live. He is seriously talented. He is one of the few important newish novelists writing in America today.

There's something refreshingly unforgiving in Bruce Wagner's lacerating Hollywood satire; those readers who've had a love/hate relationship with the movie business, an attraction-repulsion dynamic that loves movies themselves and yet is sickened by the business culture that makes it possible, will find the nasty laughs here telling, truthful, and an overdue joy to read. Anyone else who desire something redeeming to emerge from all the bad faith, a kind act or sacrifice arising from some forgotten reservoir of decency would be better off seeking less severe wit. Wagner mines the old joke about Hollywood that "underneath the tinsel there's more tinsel", and obviously appreciates Jean Baudrillard's theories on simulacara,
where the slavish and stylized impression has replaced the real; set this heady abstraction on to the business of celebrity lookalikes and the community that arises among them, we get a twisting , funhouse mirror of Hollywood , a parallel existence that mimes the worst and most inane features of the stars they imitate. Wagner, in addition, writes like a wizard.