American novelists have long blamed Hollywood for the shabby and impossible fantasies so many Americans cherish. Nathanael West, Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion and Elmore Leonard are just a few who spent time in the film industry and then wrote critical novels inspired by this experience.

Bruce Wagner is a unique case, since he grew up in Hollywood and began as a screenwriter before he ever wrote a novel. After penning both mainstream screenplays (Nightmare on Elm Street, Part III) and indie favorites (Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills), Wagner has produced four novels to date, all of which are about the insular culture of Hollywood.

Wagner's Hollywood is a disturbing place that fulfills Christopher Lasch's prediction that a culture based on an entertainment industry would be a world based on narcissism. In all of Wagner's novels, the only differences among characters are the degree of their respective narcissisms and their industry clout to impose them on others.

Still Holding, Wagner's latest, is his best. It is composed of short chapters that concern three principal characters.

Becca is an aspiring actress who earns her living mostly from impersonating Drew Barrymore at industry parties and trade shows. She seems to believe that she knows Barrymore and many other stars she has read about. She often thinks about how she will narrate her life as a look-alike when she becomes famous and is a guest on David Letterman's show.

Kit Lightfoot is a first-rank star who seems to be an amalgam of Richard Gere and Brad Pitt. He is engaged to one of the stars of the ensemble comedy Together, Viv Wembley. He is also internationally known for his personal and financial commitment to Buddhism. But he is troubled by the apparent contradiction between his religion, which seeks separation from the desires of this world, and his love of whores and drugs.

Lisanne is the personal secretary to a major agent who is expecting a baby she is seeking to hide. She has a love of food, a fear of flying and a fixation on Kit Lightfoot that leads her into delusion after the birth of her illegitimate boy. She is perhaps the hardest of the three to make sense of, since she mostly lives within her phobia and psychoses.

The key event in the novel is Kit's injury. While buying cigarettes after leaving a club, he is hit on the head with a bottle by an angry fan he had blown off. At first, the accident seems harmless, but it becomes clear that he has sustained brain damage. Ironically, he was set to play someone with brain damage in an indie movie he had chosen to bolster his artistic credentials. He cannot speak and is reduced to the most elementary needs and urgencies.

His well-publicized injury galvanizes the paparazzi, of course; but it also galvanizes the novel's main characters. Lisanne, who has only met him once, becomes obsessed with Buddhism and uses "Kit Lightfoot" as her spoken mantra. Eventually, she comes to believe that he fathered her baby. Becca ends up working for Viv Wembley after she has taken up with Alf, Kit's best friend. And near the end of the novel, Becca comes to audition with Kit to star in a Rob Reiner film about someone who heroically battles back from brain damage.

Interwoven with these characters' lives are those of real-life stars. Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, Ethan Hawke, Rob Reiner, Ed Norton and Tom Hanks are just a few of the Hollywood insiders who make cameos in the book. They are a literary equivalent of the "cameo playing oneself" that has become common in self-reflexive Hollywood films since Robert Altman's The Player.

Wagner's scenes with real people portray nothing outrageous - like, for example, Emma Goldman in E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime who gives a sensual massage to Evelyn Nesbitt. But their presence in Still Holding seems to testify to the veracity of Wagner's observations.

At root, Wagner is a moralist. He captures a world far more horrifying than any of us suspected. Indeed, the only characters who act decently in Still Holding are ones who are wounded - psychologically, or literally in the case of Kit Lightfoot. And there are the truly monstrous, such as Becca's Russell Crowe look-alike boyfriend who murdered his father before coming to Hollywood and beats up another impersonator; and Kit's father, who makes fun of all foreigners and has sex in front of his addled son.

No Hollywood novel is quite as upsetting as Still Holding. Even Wagner's earlier stories pale in comparison. Wagner's Hollywood is a world truly beyond redemption, one that deserves not adulation but profound moral outrage.

It's to Wagner's credit that it mesmerizes - even as it horrifies.



Chip Rhodes is an associate professor of English at Colorado State University. He is the author of "Structures of the Jazz Age" and the forthcoming "Love and Hate in Hollywood.