A wry, cynical look at Hollywood
Living up to parents' dreams and expectations is often difficult enough. Add to that the complexities of growing up in the shadow of a high-achieving parent's accomplishments and all the attendant fame and that's yet another massive suitcase to put in the old emotional baggage.
Bruce Wagner's new ''The Chrysanthemum Palace" is a comically caustic, sharp-eyed group portrait of three fragile souls, all offspring of Hollywood's rich and famous, set in the incestuous, narcissistic world of the entertainment industry.
The novel is narrated by Bertie Krohn, a middle-aged actor whose father is creator/producer of the wildly successful ''Starwatch," TV's longest-running space opera. As the novel begins, Bertie has come to the conclusion that life as an actor has its limitations and is in the midst of reinventing himself as a playwright. ''I had the hair-raising epiphany which inevitably occurs to most who ply my craft: Time is running out."
Bertie reconnects with a troubled childhood sweetheart, actress Clea Freemantle, daughter of a legendary film actress who committed suicide, just as Clea reunites with an old lover, the flamboyant 54-year-old character actor Thad Michelet, himself the son of a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. Landing acting spots on ''Starwatch," the three bond over their mutual plight: to ''escape the gravity of those legendary black holes." As they try to navigate the choppy waters of the TV industry, they become a mutually dependent, emotionally mercurial trio fueled by sex (used as both ''anchor and painkiller"), all manner of alcohol and pharmaceuticals, and an unstable combination of ambition, desperation, and hope.
''The Chrysanthemum Palace" is a scorching indictment of Hollywood, but done in an almost offhand, slightly obsequious manner, the tone often arch and laced with wry cynicism. Wagner veers from sincerity to irony, from comedy to tragedy, with the fast-paced whirl of a TV soap opera. Wagner's synopsis of one particular ''Starwatch" episode is piercingly funny.
Wagner's writing is intricate and inventive, at times florid and contrived, and he has a penchant for colorful metaphors, describing an aging Gold's Gym rat's teeth as gleaming like ''airbrushed headstones." But at other times. Wagner is searingly, heartbreakingly concise. His account of a trip to Disneyland beautifully captures the disillusionment of lost youth, remembering the Magic Kingdom's ''genteel mystery and endless promise of a clean, well-lit, pre-ordained world . . . Now everything was different. The kingdom was Orwellian, the world was rotten, and the singsong murderous monotone of the man alternating product promotion with safety reminders only filled me with premonitory dread."
''The Chrysanthemum Palace" reads a little like a potboiler: more surface than substance, with lots of name dropping, melodrama, and tales of colorful excess. It's diverting, even involving, but not particularly emotionally engaging; the characters seem more flash than real blood and guts.
It's also disappointingly predictable in its tragic arc. However, sprinkled amid the day-to-day theatrics are the reactions and reflections of a man trying to make sense of his life and find his place in the wacky world that surrounds him.
Wagner's insights into what it takes to find and hold one's humanity while in the clutches of Hollywood's mercenary machinery shine like brilliant little gems.
