Memorial: A Novel (Hardcover)
by Bruce Wagner
Key Phrases: travel gal, favorite weekend, Taj Mahal, New York, Big Gulp
# Hardcover: 528 pages
# Publisher: Simon & Schuster (September 5, 2006)
# Language: English
# ISBN: 0743272358
From Publishers Weekly
[Signature]Reviewed by Kurt AndersenLike Wagner's previous books,
Memorial is 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 way Short Cuts and Crash are 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, Memorial is also earnest and even life-affirming, more like
I'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 in Memorial, and although Wagner satirizes InStyle Buddhism
(like he did in 2003's Still 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, and Memorial is 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,
Memorial might also attract a new cohort of readers who want more than
all-dark-comedy-all-the-time.
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Each becomes caught in the grip of great expectations and then great
disappointment or tragedy. Joan's is the most ferocious ambition: Her
firm is up for a commission from a billionaire to build a memorial to
his brother and sister-in-law who died in the tsunami in southern India.
Never mind the irony of building a gigantic, overdesigned tribute to two
people among thousands who perished; what is compelling is Joan's
anguished desperation to get the assignment, to build something
"amazing" that would bring her the kind of supreme fame enjoyed by her
nemesis, Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid.
cont'd....
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