Simon & Schuster (2006). 528pp. $26.00
Reviewed by Michael Signorelli
10.24.06

Over the course of five novels, Bruce Wagner has established himself as one of America’s most insightful, funny, and fearless satirists by excoriating the inhabitants of our left coast: the egotistical, the self-aggrandizing, the ambitious, and the deluded. This time around, Wagner spares the Hollywood set and focuses instead on the equally self-satisfied community of “starchitects.” Be it Thom Mayne (“a sanctimonious prick-monster”), Ada Louise Huxtable (“some Edith Head-wardrobed Fountainhead buzzard”), or Zaha Hadid (“a fat Iraqi cu—”), Wagner is not one to euphemize. With the publication of his sixth novel, Memorial, he returns to his perennial themes—death, family, ambition, and fame—in a story that features bombastic social commentary and, to his credit, deeply engaging characters.

Unlikely circumstances have dislodged four members of an estranged family from their usual, circumscribed routines. Joan Herlihy, a thirty-seven-year-old architect, finds her firm vying for a prestigious commission—a Napa Valley billionaire’s private Memorial to relatives lost in the tsunami. Her brother, Chester, a Hollywood location scout, recovers from nerve damage incurred as an unwitting participant on the hidden-camera show Friday Night Frights. Their father (who they haven’t seen or heard from since early childhood), Ray Rausch, suffers a heart attack during a mistaken police raid. And their mother, Marjorie, Memorial’s patron saint, who has recently lost her second-husband, attempts to reconcile reality with fantasy by returning to India

With these events as impetus, Wagner crafts an epic and unruly novel that explores the vast inner lives of these four characters—lives in which the slightest chance happening sends them into lengthy, ecstatic, and free-associative rants. Plenty of room is made for these passionate fits of thought and Wagner seems to revel in them. Joan repeatedly lambastes her architectural rivals—inventing new, more deviant, more vulgar insults as she goes along. It becomes clear that Wagner speaks most freely through Joan and her colleagues, as opposed to other, more blue-collar characters; since their level of sophistication matches his own, he can bludgeon subjects with full force:

When architects and book designers met, it was a supercalifragilistic hagiographic clusterfuck. The collaborators reveled in making a fine arts tomb: a vanity Memorial enshrining the master who’d become an ostentatiously overdesigned object himself, essayist and typographers working with pharaonic zeal, the book a sacred extension of the guru’s body, a highfalutin Pritzkerama requiring the dignified, calibrated, meticulous touch of latex’d surgeons in an amphitheater.

This prose is alive! Barely intelligible, but alive. It’s what makes five-hundred-plus pages flash by like a busy afternoon.

Chester, Ray, and Marjorie have their say as well, but never exhibit the same vehemence as Joan. Chester, who has devolved into a dismal stoner, consistently projects blame onto those around him. Ray, who has slowed down significantly since the heart attack, sifts through his memories, cherishing his luck and regretting his mistakes. Marjorie, unlike Ray, has not yet conceded to the slow slide toward death, but has been reinvigorated by late-life independence and financial well-being. Her voice is the most fragile and hopeful. She wants to help the poor in Bombay. She wants to travel with her daughter. She wants to see the Taj Mahal Hotel, where her father took her as young girl. She is going to make the best of the time she has left. She has been enlightened, in a way. Her saintly goodwill makes it all the more tragic when—due in large part to the negligence of her children—she endures some shockingly awful treatment.

Even secondary characters—the billionaire, the travel agent, the neighbor, the hippie girlfriend—are given robust individual voices. At times this overabundance of personalities can erode the distinction between characters, but the overlap suggests in part the degree to which they are partial reflections of one another. The media-rich, ADD culture of America has permeated each one’s consciousness, and thus, they spew out much of what they have been forced to ingest, be it Larry King, Charlie Rose, My Name Is Earl, The Dog Whisperer, McDonald’s, Disney, Internet pornography, The Twilight Zone, American, Idol, Page Six, 60 Minutes, prescription drugs, Six Feet Under, DVDs, NBC, Law & Order, Nip/Tuck, BH Levy, or whatever cultural entity you would like to add. The shared struggle in Memorial is between the modern human, residing somewhere beneath his or her status exterior, and the unnerving folderol of post-9/11 existence, pressing in from all sides. If Wagner ever provides too much detail or digresses into irrelevance, it is his attempt to reflect the complicated nature of this struggle.

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