The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Marj has become the victim of a very sophisticated con scheme that almost always succeeds in bilking older, rich women out of their lives’ savings. Joan is a hard-driven, hard-bitten career woman. An established architect, Joan is intent on getting the commission for a memorial (the title character) to victims of the 2004 tsunami. She is also a neurotic, guilt-tripping nymphomaniac. Her brother Chester (“Chess”) is, by contrast, merely a lazy drug addict (and occasional movie-location scout). Ray is an old man with medical problems. Ray also has a problem: the LA cops have broken into his house, scared the hell out of much-younger Indian girlfriend and shot his dog in the ass. The dog pulls through. Similarly, Ray has a heart attack but recovers.

These four people and a handful of others (not forgetting their pets) are connected in a way that only a truly great novelist can explicate. What is really amazing is the amount of anger Wagner can pump into a story that is essentially a story of the innate goodness of humanity. This is not to say that the story is sugarcoated. Everyone in the cast of stumbling characters comes to a pretty bleak resting place at the conclusion. The journey along the way is by turns harrowing and hilarious. There is long buried family intrigue a-plenty. The characters all (to varying degrees) are obsessed with the culture and religion(s) of India and in particular the fate of the tsunami victims. That doesn’t mean Wagner can’t tee off on “grief junkies” – people who get major kicks by seeking to “help” victims of disasters. Katrina and the World Trade Center get the same withering appraisals as the tsunami and Oklahoma City. That doesn’t mean, either, that he can’t tee off and vent his truly vicious spleen on any other number of modern targets including modern health care, the media, celebrities and the business and cultural peculiarities of Hollywood.

Still, Wagner’s inner compassion is in evidence. By the end of the novel as he begins to pile on the serious violence, it almost seems the author regrets telling this particular tale. There is a scene of violence toward the end of the novel which places Wagner squarely within the tradition of John Irving and Hubert Selby, jr. as a weeping connoisseur of exquisitely horrific violence. Suffice it to say that the power of the book’s denouement is sufficient to make even the hardest hearted find him or her wiping away tears.