The Chrysanthemum Palace FROM THE PUBLISHER
The Chrysanthemum Palace introduces Bertie Krohn, the only child of Perry Krohn, creator of TV's longest running space opera, Starwatch: The Navigators (which counts Jennifer Aniston and Donald Rumsfeld among its obsessed fans). Bertie recounts the story of the last months in the lives of his two companions: Thad Michelet, author, actor, and son of a literary titan; and Clea Freemantle, emotionally fragile daughter of a legendary movie star, long dead. Scions of entertainment greatness, they call themselves the Three Musketeers; between them, as Bertie says, "there was more than enough material to bring psychoanalysis back into vogue." As the incestuous clique attempts to scale the peaks claimed by their sacred yet monstrous parents over a two-week filming of a Starwatch episode in which they costar, Bertie scrupulously chronicles their highs and lows - as well as their futile struggles against the ravenous, narcissistic, and addicted Hollywood that claims them.
FROM THE CRITICS
Carolyn See - The Washington Post
… this is a very funny book. The scenes on the set are marvelous. Parts of this novel convey pure, winsome charm, which makes the tragedy that much harder to bear. If The Great Gatsby were set in contemporary Hollywood, it might look a lot like The Chrysanthemum Palace. These are Americans, ensnared by their fate but gallant and brave to the end.
Henry Alford - The New York Times Sunday Book Review
Wagner marries his dagger-sharp, lapidary wit to an emotionally arresting narrative whose phaser is set on scorch. The more over-the-top the proceedings were, the more they enthralled me. Consider the scene in which the irascible, pretentious character actor Thad, his neck ringed with Pan-Cake, receives a ''migraine cocktail'' -- a shot of Demerol and Vistaril -- at the Chateau Marmont while citing Chekhov and T. S. Eliot. Or the one in which Thad wrestles his ''soul-killing ice queen'' mother in his trailer, begging her to take his photograph for a book she's working on, only to have her call his girlfriend, Clea, a ''slut'' who sleeps with men ''for dope, like her mother did.'' I couldn't read fast enough; I had all four feet in the trough. The experience could have been better only if I'd been lying on a beach, heavily oiled.
MIchiko Kakutani - The New York Times
With the author's latest novel, The Chrysanthemum Palace, we are back in this familiar territory, but Mr. Wagner demonstrates - as he did in his dazzling 2002 novel, I'll Let You Go - that he can do the lyrical and tender with as much panache as the outrageous and corrosive. "Chrysanthemum" isn't a major work like that earlier novel - it doesn't create a Wellesian family epic or aspire to give the reader a wide-angled, Dickensian look at the whole messy sprawl of Los Angeles - but it showcases the author's kinder, gentler side while attesting to his ever wicked eye for hypocrisy and self-deception.
The New Yorker
On the set of a schlocky TV space opera called “Starwatch,” three children of wealthy and talented parents struggle to attain success of their own. The narrator, Bertie, is the son of the show’s creator, and his current acting job is the nadir in a career of ever-shrinking ambition. His companions are Clea, the pill-popping daughter of a sexy actress who died young, and Thad, who is plagued by a personality disorder and the outsized legend of his father, an award-winning author. Suffering in the shadow of parental fame is a familiar trope of tabloid pathos, and the parents here are predictably malevolent. This slender novel lacks the kaleidoscopic frenzy of Wagner’s “cell-phone” trilogy, and its more limited range gives his relentlessly up-to-the-minute pop-trivia references a somewhat airless feel. Still, his ability to eviscerate the absurdities of Hollywood, while occasionally hinting at its basic humanity, remains undiminished.
Publishers Weekly
In his Cellular Trilogy, novelist Wagner gleefully excoriated Hollywood vanity and pretense. Obviously his hunger for butchering Tinseltown's sacred cows was not sated because in his latest work he continues to carve them up. His uproarious new satire focuses on a trio of psychologically and emotionally fragile actors, each of whom carries the added baggage of a very famous and successful parent. The story is told from the perspective of Bertie Krohn, the soon-to-be-middle-aged son of the "creator-producer in perpetua of TV's longest-running syndicated space opera, Starwatch: The Navigators." After several attempts to make it on his own artistically, Bertie succumbs to nepotism and joins the cast of Starwatch. The book revolves around his interactions with two other actors who are appearing on the series. The first is Clea Fremantle, his childhood crush and the daughter of a "legendary film actress." The other is Thad Michelet, the 50-something son of a universally revered, award-winning author. Much as Jeffrey Frank did in his excellent novel The Columnist, Wagner crafts a savage meditation on contemporary self-involvement-his characters are vacuous, name-dropping black holes of self-absorption. The writing itself is wonderfully bad, as Bertie the hapless hack attempts to chronicle his melodramatic tale with 25-cent words ("commodious," "numinous," etc.) and wickedly overwrought metaphors ("Thad's hungry eyes surveyed the topography of human detail unfolding before him like a jet devouring a runway during takeoff"). It's a short, sharp book that puts a dagger right in the heart of Hollywood. Agent, Andrew Wylie. (Feb.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
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