Hollywood have-nots

If “The Chrysanthemum Palace” were set in the rag trade, it would be a heavy-handed melodrama of outsized parents and their shriveled children. Set, instead, in the world of the Hollywood Fabulous -- the parents are, variously, a legendary movie actress, a world-famous novelist and the creator of a “Star Trek”-like television series -- it remains a heavy-handed melodrama of outsized figures and their shriveled children.

Certainly Bruce Wagner, author of a sharp satirical Hollywood trilogy culminating in 2003’s “Still Holding,” is aiming for something more complex and disturbing. In his intricate construction, three members of this dimmed second generation, around whom the novel is built, are even more tinselly and less real than the roles they’ve been hired to play in the TV space series.

The intention is darker than satire. The book is touted as F. Scott Fitzgerald meeting Nathanael West, but Wagner’s damned are not beautiful: He lacks Fitzgerald’s romantic belief. And he lacks the fire that incinerates West’s Hollywood locusts. His postmodern “whatever” (despite the garish punitiveness of the ending) does no more than stir his locusts into angry buzzing.

The story is told by one of the three. He is Bertie, son of the super-rich and endlessly celebrated Perry Krohn, creator and owner of “Starwatch.” After a few pseudo-rebellious years running an avant garde theater group that put on, among other things, “A Raisin in the Sun” with an all-white cast (nice touch), he’d returned to the humiliating home comforts of the Krohn empire. He plays a middling part in the series and dreams of writing a commercial and artistic blockbuster to outdo his father.

Stumped for a story, he decides to write about himself and two friends who chose, as he did, “to scale the Olympian summits (or at least set up base camp) of peaks already conquered, staked, claimed and mythologized by the sacred monsters who bore us.” The result is this novel, he tells us.

After getting through a patchwork of skilled writing and a fair amount that’s appalling (when Bertie presses a woman’s hands to his chest, “they kept slipping off like penguins from an ice shelf”), readers may frivolously wish he’d left the whole job to Wagner. Bertie’s erratic style may characterize his futile self-indulgence, but that doesn’t really help readers.

One of his two friends (and very briefly his lover) is Clea, daughter of one of Hollywood’s great stars. Modestly successful in art movies, her career fell away as she took up drugs. When Bertie meets her again -- they’d been childhood pals -- both are in their mid-30s, and he’s able to get her regular work on “Starwatch.”

The second friend, and the novel’s turbulent, doomed center, is Thad. His career as a highly paid comedic actor and as a so-so novelist is bigger than theirs. And his father, a towering novelist (winner of three Pulitzers and perennially mentioned for a Nobel) is a far bigger celebrity. Clearly Thad’s pallid writing success rides on his father’s name. So the psychic shortfall is equivalent to Bertie’s and Clea’s.

The damage is worse, though. Thad’s father is a monster and hates him, his mother despises him, and he may or may not have been responsible for the drowning of his favored twin brother. Bertie relates the deadly vortex into which Thad soon plunges, dragging Clea along, and which ends unsurprisingly in Death Valley.

Bertie is mildly jealous; he too might like to be fatally tempestuous, but the best he can manage is depressive kvetching. He alone may have lived to tell the tale, but he’s no Ishmael. His Pequod is a dinghy, his whale a bunch of entertainment lawyers, and Thad, his Ahab, is a paper cutout with “Doomed” scrawled all over it.

This may sound like melodramatic overload; it is. Wagner uses hacksaws and bludgeons (expensive steel hacksaws, polished mahogany bludgeons) to perform his surgical operations on our celebrity cult and the damage it works on those caught in it. Again, in fairness, there is a point to what he is attempting.

In tandem with the story of his wrecked trio, Wagner writes the “Starwatch” episode in which Thad has a specially devised leading role as an exiled space prince -- thanks partly to his father’s name. Clea is his consort. The series’ flamboyant plots and overripe rhetoric set off the tinniness of their shadowed and spoiled lives. As Thad and Clea plummet, the characters they play triumph. Instead of life imitating art, life imitates junk.

So much for the author’s point. He sets up a context for it; he fails with the characters that play out the context. He hasn’t really created them; at most he has bestowed them on us. *