Rating: 
Summary: a divergent opinion
Review: I bought this book based on all the raves I kept encountering and was completely disappointed. I kept waiting for the piercing insights and stunning prose to arrive, but they never did. Instead I was met with paper-thin characters, lurid scenarios and a nasty, cynical world-view. I chucked my copy in the recyclilng bin.
Rating: 
Summary: Wickedly acerbic, juicy read
Review: I devoured this in a few hours - it was that much fun. Check it out if you're looking for laugh-out-loud excoriations of all that is Hollywood narcissism coupled with dead-on observations of the scene. Writer has a great eye, a great wit. Only very minor quibbles: perhaps too many multi-page soliloquies and plotting that became overwrought once or twice.
Rating: 
Summary: Fabulous and heartbreaking
Review: It's quite a feat for an author to manage to be both hilarious and disturbing, but my hat is off to Bruce Wagner for doing all that and more. I stumbled upon this novel by accident and couldn't put it down. Like many of us, the author seems to have a love-hate relationship with the entertainment industry, so this book is at once a scathing indictment and a mournful love sonnet to Hollywood. I can't imagine how he wrote something so complex and wonderfully affecting, but this book both made me laugh and really broke my heart. Wagner acknowledges and appreciates our fascination with Hollywood while at the same time really condemning it in a number of shocking ways that will really make you think. A wonderful read by a really gifted writer.
Rating:
Summary: Boring, stale cartoonish characters
Review: Like other reviewers here, I too felt disappointed by what I saw as the incongruity between the "hype" around this book and what it was delivering to me when I opened it. But then, some time around page 75 or so, the novel really began to coalesce and take off to a different level. It stopped sounding like Bret Easton Ellis and started to read like James Ellroy crossed with Gary Indiana by way of Joan Didion (how's that for a pedigree?). The flippant style and throwaway cast of celebrity walkons were hard to stomach until I caught on to what I think Wagner is doing here (i.e. demonstrating that in Los Angeles--or "Hollywood," rather--stars function sort of like geographic markers and place-holders, material coordinates providing the semblance of an orientation in a basically unstable, highly distorted, and unnatural social ecology). The book's major themes--hyperreality, celebrity obsession, mirroring and look-a-likes, the flawed pursuit of meaning or power through New Age mysticism and Eastern spirituality--resonated a great deal with Wagner's brilliant Wild Palms, a pop-cult phenomenon that still haunts me many years after its release. While this narrative may feel cynical and while some of its pages (particularly the sex scenes) are downright repulsive, the book is, quite simply, gripping and substantive even when it is hardest to take.
Rating:
Summary: Worth sticking with
Review: Like other reviewers here, I too felt disappointed by what I saw as the incongruity between the "hype" around this book and what it was delivering to me when I opened it. But then, some time around page 75 or so, the novel really began to coalesce and take off to a different level. It stopped sounding like Bret Easton Ellis and started to read like James Ellroy crossed with Gary Indiana by way of Joan Didion (how's that for a pedigree?). The flippant style and throwaway cast of celebrity walkons were hard to stomach until I caught on to what I think Wagner is doing here (i.e. demonstrating that in Los Angeles--or "Hollywood," rather--stars function sort of like geographic markers and place-holders, material coordinates providing the semblance of an orientation in a basically unstable, highly distorted, and unnatural social ecology). The book's major themes--hyperreality, celebrity obsession, mirroring and look-a-likes, the flawed pursuit of meaning or power through New Age mysticism and Eastern spirituality--resonated a great deal with Wagner's brilliant Wild Palms, a pop-cult phenomenon that still haunts me many years after its release. While this narrative may feel cynical and while some of its pages (particularly the sex scenes) are downright repulsive, the book is, quite simply, gripping and substantive even when it is hardest to take.
Rating:
Summary: Don't believe the hype
Review: Read more like a "Dummies guide and false interpretation of Buddhist culture." This book is pretty bad,not as bad as the Devil Wears Prada but devastatingly close.
Rating:
Summary: FINALLY A GREAT NOVEL ABOUT HOLLYWOOD
Review: Since I've also trudged across this country by Amtrak, because of my own fear of flying, like a character in this terrific novel, I followed a friend's recommendation and bought this splendid and funny novel. What a treat. It examines Hollywood like a strong lethal and very funny (you laugh out loud) magnifying glass - following wonderful characters - including the self-absorbed life of a wannabe actress, who is a Drew Barrymore look-alike. It is all about the people who spend their lives scratching on the screen door of show business. Blocked like flies from ever getting close to the glamour of Hollywood they long for, we laugh and cry as they make their quest to find nirvana in this very nasty place. These fringe people are dealt with by Wagner with wry social commentary. This is a must read and I will read it again, when like poor Lisanne, I make my cross country journey east curled up in my sleeping car bedroom with this great book. Bravo to Mr. Wagner.
Rating:
Summary: service provider
Review: Sympathetic satire set in Hollywood feels like homecoming to earlier gem, I'm Losing You. A bit heavy on the yoga tangents here, but utterly satisfying for the die-hard Wagner fan.
Rating:
Summary: An important novelist
Review: The novel STILL HOLDING has to be considered in the context of Wagner's previous two novels: I'LL LET YOU GO and I'M LOSING YOU. What they add up to is that Wagner is an important novelist who is telling the truth about certain kinds of lives that are lived in Los Angeles and other parts of America in the early twenty first century. He can be entertaining, but he aspires to do more than that, and on the whole, despite the many flaws in his novels, he succeeds.Wagner is immensely gifted--he can write superb prose, he creates fascinating characters, and he knows how to tell a story. He is also stretching, really stretching, to address life's most profound issues, and if he doesn't quite pull it off--as the understandable complaints from other reviewers about his depiction of Buddhism indicate--he is certainly artistically courageous. Of course he has weaknesses--he over-writes: his prose often needs pruning and at least 30% of the overall length of his second and third novels are hard to justify; he has a serious anti-woman issue; his subject matter can be extreme--one often rises from a session reading a Wagner novel with a strong urge to take a long hot shower; and despite the fact that he obviously knows how to tell a story, his plots tend to flag severely in the middle of his novels, picking up (but not always) in the last 25%. This complex of strengths and weaknesses means that Wagner is not all that accessible, which is why some of his less committed readers are disappointed. But he is trying to tell us something real about the times in which we live. He is seriously talented. He is one of the few important newish novelists writing in America today.
Rating:
Summary: An important novelist
Review: The novel STILL HOLDING has to be considered in the context of Wagner's previous two novels: I'LL LET YOU GO and I'M LOSING YOU. What they add up to is that Wagner is an important novelist who is telling the truth about certain kinds of lives that are lived in Los Angeles and other parts of America in the early twenty first century. He can be entertaining, but he aspires to do more than that, and on the whole, despite the many flaws in his novels, he succeeds. Wagner is immensely gifted--he can write superb prose, he creates fascinating characters, and he knows how to tell a story. He is also stretching, really stretching, to address life's most profound issues, and if he doesn't quite pull it off--as the understandable complaints from other reviewers about his depiction of Buddhism indicate--he is certainly artistically courageous. Of course he has weaknesses--he over-writes: his prose often needs pruning and at least 30% of the overall length of his second and third novels are hard to justify; he has a serious anti-woman issue; his subject matter can be extreme--one often rises from a session reading a Wagner novel with a strong urge to take a long hot shower; and despite the fact that he obviously knows how to tell a story, his plots tend to flag severely in the middle of his novels, picking up (but not always) in the last 25%. This complex of strengths and weaknesses means that Wagner is not all that accessible, which is why some of his less committed readers are disappointed. But he is trying to tell us something real about the times in which we live. He is seriously talented. He is one of the few important newish novelists writing in America today.
|
