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oremost chronicler of the idiosyncracy that is Los Angeles, Bruce Wagner is famous for peopling his fiction with real-life film stars (Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Aniston, Steve Martin, etc.), many of whom are his friends. In his razor-sharp fifth novel, The Chrysanthemum Palace, he unleashes a new trio of troubled souls. Bertie, Clea and Thad are the grown children of a famous producer, a legendary actress, and a revered novelist, respectively. As the novel begins, they're running loose on the set of a long-running sci-fi series, but their teenage antics aren't holding up so well as they approach middle age. Camped out like "showbiz gypsies" at the Chateau Marmont for weeks on end, they do damage control for — and just plain damage to — each other. But Wagner, creator the cult comic Wild Palms, enlists his characteristic warmth and wickedness to elevate their escape from parental greatness to something almost noble. So don't call him a satirist. Or a fatalist. Or a Hollywood insider. — Emily Mead

Does Hollywood actually care about novelists or screenwriters?
In the film industry, books are relentlessly examined and picked over for possible film projects. So out of sheer commerce, Hollywood cares about books and writers. But I'm not one of these beleaguered writers who talks about Hollywood as this one-eyed, Cyclopean, freakish merchandising entity. If one is destined to be a novelist or to write screenplays, I really think that it's almost a predetermined thing. For me, it's a little bit backwards — I was writing screenplays before I began to seriously write prose at thirty-five.

It's also rare for an author to direct the film version of his own book, as you did with I'm Losing You.
The grotesque thing about directing is that it's so difficult to get the money to get projects going. As a writer, it's not unusual to write seven or eight books before really coming to the attention of the reading public. As a film director, unless you're amazingly dogged, you're in trouble if your first films fail to capture the attention, imagination or dollars of the public.

Is Bertie and Clea's parental burden unique to movie stardom?
When I drove a limousine here in Beverly Hills, I had the heiress of one of the Dow Jones fortunes on prom night, and I remember thinking how difficult it would be to have that hanging over one's head. The enormity of having a parent who has climbed Everest, maybe more than once, while the child finds himself (at least in the public's eye) at base camp struggling for breath was a really compelling notion to me. But while it's difficult to have a parent that's wealthy, it's also difficult to have a parent, period. This is about these specific progeny, not an essay about the theory of what happens to this kind of person.

So it's not always the least interesting one (as Bertie claims to be) who survives to tell the tale?
In the case of Bertie, I needed someone who would survive, who was less unstable. Thad was a walking story, and Clea, in her codependency, was a compulsive listener. This book is a lot about myths — both ancient and those reported in US Weekly — and a classic part of any myth is that the hero learns something by the telling of the tale. It's really the late coming-of-age story of a man who's nearing forty but has been in an arrested adolescence.

The expanding celebrity-industrial complex has democratized "insider" info recently. Has that affected how your books are received?
There are two key things people say: First, I don't consider myself a satirist, and yet I'm labeled that. Satire is an exaggeration of reality and my books are not. Second, my books take place in Hollywood, but many of my characters have nothing to do with the business. I don't feel that my books are an extension of this rabid interest that has developed — mostly on the East and West coast, I believe — in the minutiae of the entertainment industry. I'm hoping that's not how people read me, but I don't have any control over that.

There's a lot of anger in your humor — do you ever want to quit the place altogether?
That would be like wanting to leave Detroit because I lived forty miles from a bunch of auto assembly lines — it's just the business here. People love to say that Faulkner wrote about a county [in Mississippi], but it was just an extended dream that he had. This is Mother Los Angeles for me, and I dream really well here.

Since buying an apartment in Bombay, have you written about India?
My next book has something to do with India, but of course, people will probably say it's a Hollywood book! There's something about it that speaks to me personally — it's a bodily, emotional affinity. I grew up down the street from a movie theater in the shape of the Taj Mahal, and like all these things in your back yard, you can't escape certain places you're destined to visit or stories you're going to tell.

How many projects do you have going right now?
I'm actively working on another book and I'm actively writing for television as well, developing one series for FX and one for Sony Television, which I'm really excited about. I also wrote a script called Maps of the Stars that David Cronenberg wants to direct next, and that's going to be a very difficult project.

Are you envious that someone else gets to direct your story?
David is a good friend of mine, and I can think of nothing more narcotic than to suddenly be in a screening room watching his version of something I've written. No one has taken my books and said, "Peter Farrelly is doing this movie or we're not going to make it!" I'm not playing in that kind of arena.

You've said you don't read much. Do you watch movies or TV?
I think reading is a habit or a joy that one acquires at an early age. It's odd to me that I write books and care so much about literature when, in fact, I do so little reading of my own. I'm a Larry King addict, otherwise I fall in and out with shows. Every story that I read or watch about the tsunami is so endlessly moving to me that I'm possessed by what happened there. Everything that I hear of that terrible event has a timeless and mythological quality to it, like the man who clung to a sash on a tree and learned that the sash was there because the Buddhists feed the tree every day and it's worshipped.

You seem to be something of a fatalist. Does the tsunami resonate more because it's not a human-generated disaster?
Believing in the fatefulness of our lives is different than being a fatalist, where the implication is that I feel everything is going to come to a bad end. That's not what I think, and that's not where I write from. The tsunami is compelling precisely because of the stories people tell: This world we live in, whether it's Hollywood or New York or Bombay, is filled with beauty and with ugliness. How could I possibly invent something that surpasses these things? You cannot exaggerate the agony or the sorrow, or even explain these terrible events like 9/11, the tsunami, or the daily horrors that aren't reported. I'm not judgmental, I'm not satirizing, and I'm not pimping or peddling. I think that all of us operate at our best when we're not obsessing over our own processes, our own selves.  n°

To buy The Chrysanthemum Palace, click here.