The Edge Online - Reviews: Bruce Wagner

Force Majeure
Bruce Wagner
Arrow paperback, 468 pages
Published November 1993
ISBN 0099200813
Simon and Schuster paperback, 480 pages
Published June 2005
ISBN 0743268962
Review by Gerald Houghton (1994)

It is perfectly possible to write novels without first having been a Hollywood scriptwriter. Equally, even if you do come from that background, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that you can pen a novel not rooted in the film business. Not that any of this applies to Bruce Wagner’s first book.

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 the 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 godsend leaves him seriously ill and, finally, in a mental home.

All this is the stuff of drama, great drama, and it would be 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 wears 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.