The Review of Contemporary Fiction

I'm Losing You by Bruce Wagner
Irving Malin

Bruce Wagner. I’m Losing You. Villard, 1996. 327pp. $23.00.

Wagner uses lines from Salvatore Quasimodo as an epigraph: “Each alone on the heart of the earth / impaled upon a ray of sun: / and suddenly it’s evening.” His Hollywood—which is, of course, a metaphor of America—is a “killing field.” The battle lines are drawn between generations, conglomerates the A and non-A lists, the body and mind; on every page there is the possibility of forced entry, rape, impalement. Although he gives us hosts and parasites, victims and victimizers, he recognizes that the positions, roles, and identities change rapidly. Thus he is less interested in individuals than in crowds, shadows, ghosts—he captures the transitions of power, the swift successes and failures.

Every page vibrates with allusions to pain, hiding, linguistic twists; his language is devious, jittery, double-edged. On one page the “Dead Animal Guy”—as he calls himself in one incarnation—says: “If our critters found a nice little niche to make his quantum leap to the Great Unknown, there’s not a ‘heck’ of a lot I can do short of taking a few bites out of your wall—which I don’t think would thrill either one of us.” The problem is located in the struggling locations, the “niche” versus the “leap,” the “bite” which rips a hole out of the house to save the house from the “critter” (always referred to as “Fluffy”). The “heck” seems to fight the “Great Unknown.” The oddity of the speech is the conjunction of different modalities of diction: “heck” and “Great Unknown,” “hole” and “niche.” The body, for example, is invaded by the HIV-positive “critter”; the film is a rewrite of a rewrite; the self is transformed by chance—a writer becomes an agent; a psychiatrist is a patient. The entire text is shifting; it is a word-quake. Where is stability? How does one gain peace?

And the ironies proliferate like viruses. Wagner’s text refuses to rest in the comfortable niche, “the Hollywood novel.” It fights genre infection; it battles for supremacy of The Day of the Locust, The Last Tycoon, and the movie scripts of these novels. Therefore, it is possible to view Wagner’s brutle text as another battle ground, another power play. [Irving Malin]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction I'm Losing You by Bruce Wagner Irving Malin Bruce Wagner. I’m Losing You. Villard, 1996. 327pp. $23.00. Wagner uses lines from Salvatore Quasimodo as an epigraph: “Each alone on the heart of the earth / impaled upon a ray of sun: / and suddenly it’s evening.” His Hollywood—which is, of course, a metaphor of America—is a “killing field.” The battle lines are drawn between generations, conglomerates the A and non-A lists, the body and mind; on every page there is the possibility of forced entry, rape, impalement. Although he gives us hosts and parasites, victims and victimizers, he recognizes that the positions, roles, and identities change rapidly. Thus he is less interested in individuals than in crowds, shadows, ghosts—he captures the transitions of power, the swift successes and failures. Every page vibrates with allusions to pain, hiding, linguistic twists; his language is devious, jittery, double-edged. On one page the “Dead Animal Guy”—as he calls himself in one incarnation—says: “If our critters found a nice little niche to make his quantum leap to the Great Unknown, there’s not a ‘heck’ of a lot I can do short of taking a few bites out of your wall—which I don’t think would thrill either one of us.” The problem is located in the struggling locations, the “niche” versus the “leap,” the “bite” which rips a hole out of the house to save the house from the “critter” (always referred to as “Fluffy”). The “heck” seems to fight the “Great Unknown.” The oddity of the speech is the conjunction of different modalities of diction: “heck” and “Great Unknown,” “hole” and “niche.” The body, for example, is invaded by the HIV-positive “critter”; the film is a rewrite of a rewrite; the self is transformed by chance—a writer becomes an agent; a psychiatrist is a patient. The entire text is shifting; it is a word-quake. Where is stability? How does one gain peace? And the ironies proliferate like viruses. Wagner’s text refuses to rest in the comfortable niche, “the Hollywood novel.” It fights genre infection; it battles for supremacy of The Day of the Locust, The Last Tycoon, and the movie scripts of these novels. Therefore, it is possible to view Wagner’s brutle text as another battle ground, another power play. [Irving Malin]

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