Wagner is probably not best known for penning Nightmare on Elm Street and or even Paul Bartel's admirable Scenes From the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills. No, what Bruce Wagner is certainly best known for is authoring the original comic-strip that went on to become (with his own script) the Wild Palms TV mini-series. And there is much in his novel that will be familiar to cult-TV viewers, not least the same detached, oddly poker-faced distance from its audience that series affected in spades.

Hollywood is fickle, seems to be the message here, and one-time wonder-boy Bud Wiggins is now battling to keep the dream alive. Nothing he's written has fully made the transition from page to the actual silver screen, and although he has come close on occasion he is now reduced to limo-driving to earn a crust, moving back in with his plastic surgery-disaster of a mother, Dolly, while he finishes Toy Soldier, the piece he hopes will put him finally back on the fast-track. But life has a way of slapping Bud Wiggins back: lucrative job offers mask hidden agendas; his self-published novella sells well in a fashionable bookstore, or so he thinks; a friend is murdered; his relationships with women, particularly those with whom he is scrupulously honest, collapse about his ears; and a trip to Mexico that appears a god-send leaves him seriously ill and, finally, in a mental home.

All this is the stuff of drama, great drama, and it would hard, indeed churlish, to deny that Wagner seizes his opportunity with glee. There is much in here that is praiseworthy, not the least the way in which Wagner successfully creates a suitably existential trip through the more outlandish and bizarre fringes of the Hollywood establishment, spiced with a liberal helping of exceptionally dark humour.

Where Wagner wrongfoots himself, and wrongfoots himself seriously, is in not knowing when to stop. Force Majeure, at well over 450 pages, is long, but worse, it seems longer. Within a short time the set-up/pay-off structure as Bud Wiggins' schemes and dreams are systematically battered to death is established beyond question. As a consequence, the book drags on well past the half-way mark and barely limps intact to the finishing line. Similarly, the flip, knowing quality to too much of the humour gets wearing on the casual reader long before the insider author, which probably explains precisely why film-figures themselves - Carrie Fisher and Oliver Stone, for two - are liberally quoted on the cover.

Force Majeure is the kind of book you're loathe to hate, but even more loathe to love. Maybe, like Wild Palms, it would have made a better comic-strip. Or maybe we should just wait for the movie.