Dream Warrior: On Bruce Wagner’s Remarkable Oeuvre

The time has come for Bruce Wagner. Because Wagner is the most pun-drunk writer since Nabokov, if not since Shakespeare, I couldn’t possibly not mean this phrase in multiple senses. For one thing, Wagner says he’s finished. After an almost 35-year career in fiction punctuated by occasional movie and TV writing, which includes his celebrated screenplay for director David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars (2015), the 70-year-old novelist announced in a 2024 podcast appearance that his most recent book would be his last. He quoted Philip Roth’s phrase upon his own retirement: “the long struggle with writing is finished.” In that sense, Wagner’s time, by his own choice, is up. On the other hand, Wagner’s time has only just arrived. After the vicissitudes of a long literary life, he is now enjoying a renaissance; not only isn’t he finished, but he’s flourishing like never before. As a near-death experience may bring the survivor a rush of vitality, so Wagner’s recent brush with cancellation has won him a new publisher, a new audience, and a new place in the American literary firmament. 

In that most cancel-stricken, cancel-ridden year of 2020, Wagner’s then-publisher, Counterpoint Books, effectively killed as “problematic” (their word) a novel manuscript he’d submitted, The Marvel Universe: Origin Stories. One of the characters is an obese influencer who calls herself The Fat Joan on Instagram in tribute to the real-life comedian who styled himself The Fat Jew; according to Wagner, his editor told him that not even a character could call herself “fat.” After receiving these and other complaints about the novel’s language, Wagner refused to alter the text for the sake of ideology. He pulled the manuscript and released the novel into the public domain as a pdf on his website. This then-typical story of literary censoriousness caused only the briefest media ripple in 2020’s tsunami of public controversy and calamity — reflected in the “canceled” novel itself, partly set in the year of its publication — but its consequences for Wagner’s career and for literary publishing in general would prove momentous.

After the Marvel Universe’s cancellation, an East Coast publisher refused — also as “problematic” — the manuscript Wagner shopped around next, an oral biography of a fictional polymathic artist who is both biracial and transgender, a subject forbidden to a cishet white male writer under the dispensation of identity politics then (and perhaps still) dominant at the major publishers. Following this second refusal, Wagner’s agent, Andrew Wylie, put him in touch with Tony Lyons, founder of Skyhorse Publishing. Lyons founded the independent Skyhorse in 2006. Since then, it’s had a controversial profile. Skyhorse’s nonfiction slate, for example, boasts polemics by MAGA luminaries like Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, and Tucker Carlson, not to mention Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s The Real Anthony Fauci (2021) and Melania Trump’s Melania (2024), though they also offer work by longtime progressives (Chris Hedges, Robert Scheer) and anti-Trump books, including former Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s bestselling 2020 tell-all. Under the uncommonly broad aegis of Lyons, who described himself in a 2023 Wall Street Journal profile as a “free speech Democrat,” Skyhorse also specializes in picking up canceled books, like Woody Allen’s memoir Apropos of Nothing (2020) and Blake Bailey’s biography Philip Roth (2020), both of them dropped by mainstream presses because of sexual misconduct allegations against their authors. 

In 2010, Skyhorse acquired a literary imprint, Arcade, once a storied independent press founded in 1988 by Richard Seaver, an editor and publisher renowned for helping to bring experimental writers like Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, and Henry Miller to a popular audience. Under Arcade’s standard, Wagner’s “problematic” fictional biography ROAR: American Master, The Oral Biography of Roger Orr was published in 2022 after the East Coast publisher refused to take it on. In 2024, with Wagner as its figurehead, Arcade extended its reach deeper into literary territory ceded by the risk-averse Big Five. They not only published Wagner’s The Met Gala & Tales of Saints and Seekers: Two Novellas, his self-proclaimed final book, but also began to release titles in his catalogue going back to his first novel; in striking new paperback editions with details from classic artworks adorning their covers, Arcade published six of Wagner’s pre-ROAR books in 2024, with two more scheduled for 2025. In addition, and with Wagner’s help as editorial adviser, they’ve begun to acquire a slew of first novels by younger writers whose provocative visions—for reasons aesthetic, ideological, or both—don’t fit into the mainstream: writers like Matthew Davis, Emmalea Russo, Ben Faulkner, Matthew Gasda, and Noah Kumin. 

His career having survived an attempt to suppress his often ferocious vision, then, Bruce Wagner has become more relevant than ever. And this renaissance comes just in time, because American literature has not witnessed a late surge like Wagner’s since the run of novels the aforementioned Philip Roth produced in his twilight years. Wagner’s last three books — Marvel Universe, ROAR, and The Met Gala — are, along with his 2012 epic Dead Stars, easily his best works, as well as some of the finest American fiction published in this century. 

With the announcement of his retirement from writing, and with Arcade’s re-release of most of his oeuvre, readers now have the opportunity to survey this most remarkable literary trajectory from its beginnings. 

Foreshadowing his later decision to release The Marvel Universe into the public domain, Wagner’s career appropriately began with independent publishing. His first novel, Force Majeure, was self-published in part in 1988 before Random House put out an expanded edition in 1991 to acclaim from figures as various as Carrie Fisher, William Gibson, and Oliver Stone (with whom Wagner would collaborate on the surreal post-Twin Peaks TV miniseries Wild Palms in 1993). Force Majeure is an interconnected suite of semi-autobiographical short stories focused on Wagner’s hapless alter ego, the aspiring screenwriter Bud Wiggins. The title is a film industry term of art — Wagner defines it in the novel’s epigraph — for the circumstances under which a producer may terminate a writer’s contract without compensation; since these circumstances include an “act of God,” Bud’s Hollywood trials come to seem like a more farcical version of the Book of Job. 

As disclosed in the poignant and lyrical reflections of Force Majeure’s first half, much of Bud’s backstory echoes what Wagner has reported of his own past in many interviews and podcast appearances: his rearing in an abusive L.A. home — adjacent to but not among the rich and famous — by an unstable TV-producer-turned stockbroker father; his dropping out of Beverly Hills High School and subsequent confinement in an institution for a “character disorder”; his work as an ambulance and limousine driver, as well as a bookstore clerk, and his attempts to break into screenwriting, with his only semi-successful credit being on a horror sequel of dubious cultural merit. To these verifiably autobiographical facts, Wagner adds Bud’s struggles against his overbearing mother and a bevy of often humiliating romantic entanglements. 

Bud is a neurotic schlemiel out of Portnoy’s Complaint or Annie Hall; impotence and disease loom large in his story, as they will throughout Wagner’s intensely hypochondriacal corpus. His meditations, written in a lush close third person rather than contemporary autofiction’s fashionably numb first, comprise Wagner’s first foray into the terrible beauty of his city and of our world. Nevertheless, the accomplished first novel, rife with extended dream sequences and fictional excerpts from Bud’s and other characters’ literary and screen work, eventually outstays its welcome.

In the novel, Bud co-writes the fictional Bloodbath 2 and characteristically fails to receive credit or compensation; in what passes for reality, however, Wagner had more success co-scripting Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors (1987). Slasher-trashy as it is, this horror sequel’s premise — a plucky crew of institutionalized teens come together to fight the dream-bound supernal child-killer Freddie Krueger — anticipates Wagner’s later and more serious work. Because Force Majeure has no linear plot, it won’t count as a spoiler if I reveal its penultimate event: Bud, after reflecting again on his own lonely and victimized childhood, molests a little girl. From this explosive ending, much of what matters most in Wagner’s later work erupts. The cycle of victimization, the threat to children posed by a corrupt adult world, masculinist aggression toward the feminine: these will be among Wagner’s grandest themes. We could read his entire body of work as a passionate attempt to transcend the inner forces impelling Bud’s ghastly act, to escape the karmic cycle where perpetrator and victim perpetually trade places and where force brutally attempts to subdue grace and innocence.

Such escape will have to wait for later volumes, however. Wagner’s second novel, I’m Losing You (1996), evades the proverbial sophomore slump with its ripe sophistication, but it does not quite achieve greatness. The first in Wagner’s so-called Cellphone Trilogy — the novels stand alone, but each has a title evocative of early cellular communication — it introduces some of his most characteristic devices. Like many of his later works, it is an integral novel comprised of linked but standalone sections, each focused on a single cast of characters. Its apparently plotless but actually knotty story joins wealth and poverty, celebrity and anonymity, through occulted family lineages among varied Angelenos. It is the first but not last of Wagner’s novels to be impossible to summarize except by a schematic chart of the characters’ ornate interrelations, most of them unknown to themselves and each other. Wagner defeats the critic’s urge to simplify by creating a novelistic experience as irreducibly complex as the baffling world the novel represents. In this respect, I’m Losing You and its successors recall Henry James’ warily admiring observation about Balzac’s novels. They are “a reproduction of the real on the scale of the real.” 

In this second novel, we find Wagner’s preoccupation with disease and death, as a young starlet is paralyzed from a botched root canal, while an old one slowly expires of cancer; a psychotherapist-to-the-stars who will reappear in several later books further reflects the author’s interest in self-knowledge, self-involvement, and self-escape. Wagner exhibits his career-long fascination with criminal schemes in a then-timely subplot about scammers defrauding AIDS patients of their life insurance policies. A fractious lesbian ménage, the first of several movingly and sympathetically portrayed in Wagner’s oeuvre, struggles, like Bud Wiggins before them, to make serious cinematic art in an obdurately philistine Hollywood. But, via a character who becomes a ritual bather of the dead as per Jewish tradition, Wagner launches a chief ethical concern notably absent from the earlier Bud Wiggins stories: compassionate action as antidote to ego. As with Force Majeure, the sentence-to-sentence quality of the prose and the tragicomic poignance of the characters’ lives make I’m Losing You worth reading on its own account; but even at their best, both novels are antipasti to the more magnificent feast Wagner will later serve. 

Wagner’s vast third novel, and the second in the cellular trilogy, I’ll Let You Go (2002), makes a more concerted charge at “Great American Novel” status. An overt Dickensian pastiche, a Los Angeles Bleak House, the novel follows two plots across more than 700 pages until they slowly converge. First, we meet the unimaginably wealthy Trotter family: a patriarch obsessed with finding his ideal funeral monument, a son who obsessively buys land and property, and a daughter who has constructed a labyrinth — no doubt the novel’s image of its own elegant complication — on the family estate. Our protagonist is the Trotters’ winning adolescent scion, Toulouse or “Tull,” whose quest for his vanished father — once the husband of the labyrinth-making mother — furnishes the long novel with its impetus. Tull is joined in his adventurous coming-of-age by his cousins, the “girl detective” and aspiring novelist Lucy, with whom the adolescent hero enjoys the incestuous amours that will later loom large in Wagner’s work, and the brilliant Edward, a witty Wildean boy-polymath disfigured by Apert syndrome. Meanwhile, far from the rich overworld of the Trotters’ Bel-Air estate, we encounter the downtown L.A. underworld where the abused orphan girl Amaryllis Kornfeld barely subsists with her kindly protector, a schizophrenic former pastry chef convinced he is the 19th-century artist and poet William Morris. Abandoning the state-of-the-art neo- and postmodernist lyricism characterizing the style of his first two novels, Wagner narrates in the High Victorian mode of the third-person narrator as stately docent and exhorter. The tale has as clear a moral as any in Wagner’s oeuvre, perhaps the moral underlying Wagner’s oeuvre: “I believe a person can decide…can make the decision to love. And then love follows.” Wagner even pauses to chide any small-souled reader who finds his ingenious contrivances implausible:

Each of us has experienced the garden-variety oddity and omen—the myriad small coincidences that color our days and are usually dismissed out of hand. Yet we persist in believing such close encounters exist only in fiction—as if life itself were too orderly, too sober and practical for the improbable absurdities of mystery. […] Ironically, it is the cynical reader himself who is threatened with fictionalization; yet such a bewitching seems unlikely, for, like characters in a threadbare novel, little has happened to these cynics, nor likely ever will. Thus may they go to their graves.

I’ll Let You Go, as Wagner’s most traditional (indeed 19th-century) novel, may also be his most companionable — a good entrée to his work for readers wary of his later productions’ penchant for the extreme and “problematic.” In one chapter title, which several later novels will reprise, Wagner evokes the trope of “imaginary prisons.” The phrase comes from the Italian artist Piranesi’s elaborate 18th-century carceral engravings, but it stands at large for the mental and emotional constructs blocking our human development. As a character observes, “we are often trapped within wondrous designs.” Wagner’s Dickensian imitation, no matter how beautifully performed, may be just such a prison for the literary imagination, a backward-looking triumph instead of a novel adequate to present circumstances, as Dickens’s were in their own time. 

After I’ll Let You Go, our view of Wagner’s progress is unfortunately obstructed. Perhaps due to difficulties with securing rights, Arcade has not yet rereleased his fourth, fifth, and sixth novels: Still Holding (2003), which concludes the cellular trilogy; The Chrysanthemum Palace (2005); and Memorial (2006). 

When we catch up to him again in Dead Stars (2012), however, we find an author in full command of his powers. He’s a novelist less on the way to discovering his “voice,” as the weary MFA cliché has it, than his voicelessness — his capacity to abandon the authorial ego on display in I’ll Let You Go’s virtuoso Victorian pastiche and instead channel all the voices, from the highest to the lowest, of America’s increasingly delirious culture. Dead Stars starts with a chaos of online text before introducing its characters. Obscene comment sections and clickbait headlines discordantly sound the novel’s main theme: the desecration of life, often at its source. Wagner ties another Gordian plot, this time with added outrageousness: a double-mastectomied 13-year-old girl jealous of her prerogatives as the world’s youngest breast cancer survivor; a controversial Sally Mann-like photographer with a celebrity-worshiping 16-and-pregnant daughter who has re-named herself Reeyonna (sic) and a son who has become a paparazzo in the lucrative business of surreptitiously photographing female celebrities’ genitalia (including those of the underaged); Reeyonna’s boyfriend, a Black adoptee who schemes and struggles to rise in the world; and, most surprising of all, the actor Michael Douglas, recovering from his bout with throat cancer and determined to reassert his vitality by directing and starring in an All That Jazz remake whose artist-hero doesn’t die at the end. 

Befitting its polysemous title, Dead Stars is Wagner’s darkest novel, and certainly his most obscene. In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani famously called it “[s]tomach-turning, sick-making, rancid, repugnant, repellent, squalid, odious, fetid, disgusting.” Wagner narrates in the excitable voices, online and off-, of characters who inhabit a post- and anti-culture. Vast quantities of the novel’s fragmentary and colloquial language orbit the collapsing stellar object of the commodified, objectified, and above all degraded life-source of the female body; the word “cunt” accordingly recurs with a frequency that would have startled even banned-book divos like Joyce and Lawrence, as do endless puns on the female genitalia, and elaborate, grotesque, pornographic scenarios. Leaving the pornography aside, the novel’s racial discourse — “cunt” is not the only forbidden word Wagner is willing to use; he also deploys or detonates an explosive epithet I can’t type here — renders it impossible to imagine a major publisher printing this book today, though Penguin ventured it in 2012. 

And yet, Wagner, so often misleadingly tagged a satirist, never mocks his characters, neither his stars who wish to be ordinary humans nor his ordinary humans who wish to be stars. If Reeyonna discovers authentic meaning and identity in the only culture available to her — the 2010s world of pop and reality-TV stardom — then Wagner honors her achievement in the midst of its exigency. Michael Douglas, meanwhile, appears not as an object of mockery but as a fully-fledged novelistic character; his mid-novel memento mori stroll in L.A.’s Westwood cemetery, where his famous father is buried, offers one of the most poignant funerary visits in experimental literature since Leopold Bloom attended Paddy Dignam’s funeral. Wagner’s extraordinary twisting of pop against itself to produce literature of a high and serious order here reaches its almost cosmic apogee, as does his redemption of his novel’s savagely hardcore content in unabashedly sentimental scenes where his characters — if I may borrow from Reeyonna’s near-namesake chanteuse — find love in a hopeless place. Not for nothing does Wagner in an epigraph cite Dante’s concluding lines (in the original Italian, no less) from the Paradiso about “the love that moves the sun and other stars.”

As this invocation of love intimates, the Jewish-born Wagner’s immersion in the nebulous world of “spirituality,” the New Age, and Buddhism — he was at one time an adept of ’60s guru Carlos Castaneda and has also studied in India — gives his novels’ episodes their air of the fable or koan. His major characters almost always journey toward an enlightened transcendence of our illusory existence down here in the sub-spiritual realm, an existence redeemable solely by our choosing the path of compassion. This Southern Californian religion-of-no-religion, that uniquely American synthesis of gnosticism, Buddhism, and self-help often derided as the vapid, self-involved ideology of “la-la land” or “the land of fruits and nuts,” startlingly provides Wagner’s fiction the spiritual ballast granted Flannery O’Connor by Catholicism or Cynthia Ozick by Judaism. Wagner doesn’t shy from mocking the more shallow manifestations of New Age spirituality in his work, especially among the wealthy celebrities who populate his pages, but neither does he scant the real, complex history and theology of Buddhism, Sufism, and other traditions. He takes his western and eastern esoterica seriously as the ethical ground of his fiction.

Bud Wiggins returns in Dead Stars, too. The author’s self-lacerating self-insert reappears as a perennially failed novelist and screenwriter, now approaching late middle age, and still struggling against his domineering mother. Wagner’s worldview has noticeably matured since Force Majeure’s Portnoy-esque hijinks, however. While the novel’s main divisions are named for pregnancy’s three trimesters, the epilogue proposes a fourth trimester: nothing less than the human sojourn on earth where our souls, not our bodies, are gestated. Key to this human bildung, Dead Stars suggests, is learning not to take out the pains besetting our incarnated souls on the vessels who brought us to birth in the first place, though Wagner, here refusing neo-Victorian sentimentalism, allows that mothers sometimes fail their children, too.

The frustrated writer Bud’s many comical reflections on American literature circa 2012—see especially his send-up of prestige TV’s challenge to the novel’s hegemony, as well as his defense of the late David Foster Wallace against what he interprets as Jonathan Franzen’s high-handed eulogizing, behind which the experimentalist Wagner can perhaps be heard chiding the realist—invite us to consider Wagner’s own place in American letters. Is there a living novelist capable of synthesizing, as he does in Dead Stars and its successors, the same range of literary and cultural influences? First, there is his beloved Dickens, from whom he derives his interest in suffering orphans and hidden bloodlines and the city-as-labyrinth. But then he also cites in interviews and in his novels’ own allusions a long history of Continental extremist writing (apparently first introduced to him in adolescence by Henry Miller), including pre- and post-realist fiction from Cervantes and Rabelais through Voltaire and Sade to Hamsun and Bataille. From this provocative body of work he garners his “problematic” obsession with sexual transgression and psychological aberration, filthy language and unsparing horror, not to mention his refusal to take the form of the novel for granted as a staid, well-behaved chronicle of middle-class manners and morals. To these influences we might also add his pun addiction, and his related commitment to language as the malleable, combustible stuff of fiction, which binds him to modernists like Joyce and Nabokov. And add, too, his fearless commitment to canvassing the whole of the contemporary zeitgeist, including its forbidden zones, shared with such older contemporaries as Mailer and DeLillo, even when his dizzying perspective makes theirs look timid. 

The three books following Dead Stars’ triumph are each brilliantly readable experiments, if comparatively minor. The Empty Chair (2014) is Wagner’s first experiment with a diptych of novellas and with fiction styled as oral history. Dispensing with Bud Wiggins, Wagner appears in propria persona as the recorder of two monologues on the theme of Buddhist spiritual aspiration. The first and most memorable recounts the suicide of a boy who has taken his Buddhist stepmother’s teaching about the transcendence of ego too literally. The provenance of the titular chair from which he leapt to hang himself is the second novella’s eventual revelation. Readers who might find Wagner’s other work too credulous about syncretic Californian spirituality will be suitably challenged by this searching and almost nihilistic Eastern theodicy.

While I have no proof of this, the next two works feel as if they might have been conceived for the screen. The sad and outrageous I Met Someone (2016) is a dialogue-rich novel seemingly intended for the arthouse theater as a provocative 21st-century spin on Douglas Sirkian Technicolor melodrama. It concerns an iconic triple-Oscar-winning actress, a gay-rights pioneer as the first openly lesbian star, who discovers that her much-younger wife is actually her long-lost daughter. The operatic extremity of emotion unleashed by this discovery provides Wagner’s most intense manifestation of  his fixation (unusual in a male novelist) on maternity as experienced from the maternal point of view, and of his provocative use of incest as a trope for universal human interconnection.

Speaking of Wagner’s trans-feminine interests, he published his next novel, A Guide for Murdered Children (2018), under the female pseudonym Sarah Sparrow, perhaps to corner the thriller market of Gillan Flynn and her imitators. A high-concept supernatural suspense novel — Stranger Things meets True Detective by way of (yes!) A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 — it stars a group of child victims reincarnated in the bodies of recently deceased adults to take vengeance on their killers. As in much genre fiction, Wagner’s characters dilate too much upon the far-fetched conceit and its rules. (It’s not as if Kafka tried to “world build” around Gregor Samsa’s eponymous metamorphosis.) But the novel’s eventual skepticism about violent revenge, and its approach instead to an ideal of universal compassion, rivals The Empty Chair for anguished spiritual questioning, even if it is set in Michigan rather than California.

Finally, we arrive at the “problematic” novel itself, the one whose cancellation inaugurated the latest and last phase of Wagner’s career: The Marvel Universe: Origin Stories (2020). As with Dead Stars, the title yields multiple meanings. It refers not only to the dominant “extended universe” of 2010s cinema and its penchant for how-I-became-a-superhero narratives, but also to our world of shattering disasters and miraculous visitations, stunning revelations and mundane calamities, all of them originating in the family and in the flesh. In its three separate but related sections we meet a typically marvelous and timely Wagner cast: a showrunner falsely accused during the #MeToo movement by opportunists who don’t know he really did once rape a subordinate, a crime for which he’s tried to spend his life atoning; a disturbed little girl obsessed with the Wolverine movies and convinced she is a mutant in exile; her mother, a swindler posing as the daughter of Elon Musk to take sexual and financial advantage of a credulous and eventually murderous Midwesterner; and many more. 

Having taken a long journey from I’ll Let You Go’s Victorian reliquary, Wagner’s prose here has swallowed the contemporary idiom whole — emojis, hashtags, streaming series, and all — and synthesized it into a potent omni-punning metaphysical hyperpop poetry unrivaled for its energy in contemporary fiction:  

What if all along she’d been poised for mythic glory?

What if the inconsequential victories and humiliations of a vain, clownish, go-nowhere showbiz career were in fact part of a superlunary mandala?

Meghan had moved from Suits to Sussex; why wouldn’t the exodus of Ali Nell entail a royal entourage as well?

Yes: like Meghan holding a scepter, or Dany Targaryen clutching the long, scaly neck of her beloved, Ali Nell would gallop to the Celestial City in a cavalcade of ruined neurons and rogue microbes, numinous carriage wheels sparking, her ineffably useless body attended by followers and alit by a nimbus of Infinite Love.

And the magic-realist celebrity-studded affair narrated in the novel’s first section between the morbidly obese influencer Joan Gamma and the ALS-stricken (or is she?) actress Ali Nell is not only the best thing in the novel, and not only the best single freestanding sequence in Wagner’s oeuvre, but one of the most literally soaring romances in an American canon that’s never been notable for triumphant love stories amid the whale hunts, river voyages, and songs of self. If this world sometimes seems a prison, Wagner tells us, love is the only true means of escape, though it may prove love unto death. Furthering the point, Bud Wiggins returns a final time in his most bathetic incarnation — now an elderly, seedy, homeless grifter, he proves to be Joan’s estranged grandfather — only to be slain at last, as if to free Wagner’s consciousness from the constraint of his resentment-consumed failure of a double. 

If The Marvel Universe boasts Wagner’s finest single sequence, his follow-up, ROAR: American Master, The Oral Biography of Roger Orr (2022), is undoubtedly his most successful novel considered as an integral whole, especially since it dispenses with the fragmentary story-or novella cycle form he often works with in favor of linear grand narrative. As the subtitle suggests, this substantial book is a novel in the form of a faux-oral history about a fictional celebrity, the polymathic Roger Orr, nicknamed “Roar,” who is a genius-level comedian, songwriter, novelist, film director, and dermatologist. (Followers of Wagner’s career, however, will note that this genius receives a bad New York Times review from Michiko Kakutani in only one example of the novel’s many metafictional japes.) Roar is biracial, with a brilliant jazz singer for a biological mother, a brutal rapist Klansman for a biological father, and a hugely wealthy adopted West Coast Jewish family. He is a bisexual man who first becomes a transgender woman and who then transcends gender altogether on the spiritual grounds that one should not become obsessed with redecorating the hotel room of the body. 

Roar’s tumultuous life intersects with the lives of everyone who matters in American (or western) 20th century public life, from Billie Holiday and Jack Kerouac and Francis Bacon, through Steven Spielberg and Philip K. Dick and Sammy Davis, Jr., to Jan Morris and Michelle Obama and Amanda Gorman, with time to spare for Ram Dass, Susan Sontag, Ralph Ellison, Dave Chappelle, Elon Musk, Harold Bloom, Donald Judd, Gore Vidal, Toni Morrison, Beverly D’Angelo, Cindy Sherman, and many, many more, all of whom offer a cascade of coruscating witness to his life and times from 1940 to 2018: “Roar was a warlock, a witch, he was both, he surfed the collective unconscious.” His life embodies almost a century of cultural change; he is, as Wagner said in a promotional video for the novel, “all of us.” All necessarily includes the shadow side. Roar’s disturbingly Rabelaisian antics include his rumored anal rape of a school bully with a cattle prod and his definite oral rape of Norman Mailer while masked and dressed in drag at Truman Capote’s black and white ball. Both episodes, we infer, suggest Roar’s baleful inheritance from his rapist father, just as his artistic raptures descend from his miraculously gifted mother. In other words, Wagner again pays the maternal and feminine principles a generous tribute. Birth mothers aside, Philip K. Dick and Roar mutually define themselves as “brothers from another Other.” Our hero, with his motto “all is illusion,” pursues what we are to finally understand as a spiritual quest to transcend this world:

Roar called the world a “prison planet.” He said we got so accustomed the steel bars that we don’t see them. We think we’re free but don’t know what that word means. Like in the Kristofferson song—“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Except what it should be is “just another word for nothing left.” Maybe that’s the same thing; I ain’t gonna argue with Kris. It takes a lot of work to understand “free,” to understand what it truly means. Roar said the same thing about the word “love” too.

Wagner in his guise as compiler and editor does not write ROAR in parodies of the 400+ real-life celebrity characters’ voices, which would be a tedious stunt, but rather in a timeless vernacular, obscene and rapturous, obsessively paronomasial, a kind of vulgar Shakespearean dream of American English. We might finally read the novel as a dream not only of language but of history: as Wagner’s elegiac reverie, in our fragmented era, over a vanished American century when a figure like Roar could dominate the whole world of arts and culture.

Roar had long envisioned an artwork exhibiting classical form, which it then radically undermines in a culminating “subversion.” When Wagner’s novel likewise breaks the frame of the oral biography in its final pages, when it bursts with a minor and forgotten character’s stream-of-consciousness — another of the young and discarded sufferers Wagner privileges over his dying or dead stars — we come to understand that we have not witnessed a literary gimmick but a literary miracle, one it wouldn’t have occurred to most other living novelists to attempt, even were mainstream publishing in the mood to permit a writer of ambition to inhabit characters who explore such multitudinous identities on their way to shedding the troublous ego. 

This brings us to Wagner’s self-avowed final book, published last year, The Met Gala & Tales of Saints and Seekers: Two Novellas. Labeled “poison” on its title page, The Met Gala reads like an almost self-parodying late-work condensation into the smallest possible compass of every major Wagner novel, from its conjunction of Hollywood high- and low-lifes to its scabrous eroticism, from its celebrity cameos to its spiritual ardors; even its central love story, between a teen transgirl and a dying androgynous boy, recapitulates The Marvel Universe in a minor key. A subplot about our teen trans heroine and the heist of Gustave Courbet’s famous vulvic portrait, L’Origine du monde (its title putting a belated gloss on an earlier book’s subtitular Origin Stories) completes Wagner’s meditation on the cultural and human necessity of becoming-woman begun in Dead Stars. The second novella, Tales of Saints and Seekers, is labelled “antidote.” A compilation of spiritual fables in the mode of Sufi or Buddhist parables, it alleviates with comic grace the pornographic emotions aroused by The Met Gala. As such, it stands as Wagner’s last and most explicit statement of our need to redeem the degradations of the mundane by using love and compassion to access the higher reality of which it is the merest shadow. This potently distilled final book of Wagner’s would also be a fine place to start reading him.

Why, in the end, read him at all? As an unfashionable maximalist, Wagner writes in the identifiable tradition of the Great American Novel, attempting comprehensively to diagnose our maximally chaotic cultural condition, usually from the privileged vantage of his native Los Angeles where American dreams are made, and often in weighty tomes characterized by intricate plotting, baroque style, and vast and eccentric dramatis personae. But his works, especially those of his career’s second half, exhibit no nostalgia for the bygone literary days of Melville or James or Faulkner or Bellow. Instead, inside the labyrinths of their plots, Wagner unsparingly includes so much of the vertiginous present — the icons of celebrity culture, the argot of internet folkways, New Age religion’s frauds and adepts, the criminal undergrounds and abovegrounds of desperately poor and unfathomably rich transgressors, the expanding universe of gender and sexual identities — as to make the venerable novel form not only novel once more, but almost unrecognizable, as if it were a gossipy image board run by a dirty-minded Charles Dickens or a verbal manga scripted by a sentimental James Joyce. 

John Pistelli is the author of the novel Major Arcana (Belt Publishing 2025) and of the bestselling Substack newsletter Grand Hotel Abyss. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA.