Books: I'm Losing You, by Bruce Wagner

Reading this book inspired a realization: it's imperative that I list "source of recommendation" along with author and title on my reading list. I'm Losing You is one of the most dreadful pieces of crap to which I've ever subjected myself, and I don't even know whom to blame for the experience. It's a semi-recent book (mid-90s), and the only other recent read equally as bad (different genre; same problems) is also fairly recent, and also landed on my list by some unknown means (that being My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk.) The only other recent read nearly as bad (different genre; same problems, but to a much lesser extent) just came out last year, and landed on my list because of a Slate book review (hard to chew out a book reviewer) (and that book being Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart). I would have completely lost all faith in contemporary literature (as in writers writing right now) if it weren't for David Foster Wallace. And we'll see about the new Pynchon, one of these days.

Why is I'm Losing You a dreadful piece of crap? Wagner, like Pamuk, like Shteyngart, is a proficient writer; he is wry and witty, he has a great vocabulary, and he puts words together in an interesting way. This makes slogging through this bog of a book even more disappointing. Here are the fatal flaws, in order of importance:

1. There is no plot. Things happen, certainly, but there is no central, compelling plot that carries the book from the beginning through the end. I'm down with post-modernity—probably more than the next guy—but this isn't a fractured tale that casts traditional storytelling to the wind. It's a series of loosely-connected sketches in which the characters' activities do not move us in any way. Which brings me to

2. The characters are not at all empathetic. First of all, there are just too many of them. The reader spends more time deciphering who's who and who's connected to whom and how than caring about the characters. In fact, nearly all of the characters are simply unlikeable (and often unbelievable): cold cutouts, photocopies of stock characters—the new age energy worker, the washed up talk show host, the high-power exec with aberrant sexual preferences: the usual parade of wanna-bes, it-girls, and has-beens.

Throughout the book, a lot of characters randomly die, unlikely victims of drugs, violence, accidents, and disease. The reader watches them die without caring, sometimes with a bit of pleasure (at last that snivelly character is gone!), but generally hoping that an atomic bomb will come from nowhere (sort of like everything else comes out of nowhere) and wipe out the totality of Hollywood (the cold, fake setting, of course, for this cold, fake book). Wagner is known for writing credits on the early-90s mini-series Wild Palms, and one can't help but see the influence of that vapid genre in this book, which could be brilliant farce if it didn't take itself so seriously (always a mini-series failing). If I wanted TV, I wouldn't have read a book.