I MET SOMEONE

A novel of contemporary Hollywood, featuring dozens of real celebrities and a few invented ones.

Nominally the story of a lesbian movie star named Dusty Wilding and the intrigues surrounding her search for her long-lost daughter, this book is in such poor taste, so wildly overwritten, and so apparently unedited that its main use is in a party game where people pass it around and read sentences aloud at random. Perhaps you will get this one. “Embedded in the lining of the net, the Fappening’s birth had been inevitable, yet fate and history had chosen him to summon the lava flow of exposed taboo bodymaps—Jennifer Lawrence’s and lesser cousins’—that verily swamped Old Reality, engulfing the pristine, elitist coastal cities of the lascivious, clay-footed gods of TMZ.” Or maybe this one: “ ‘I don’t know,’ said Tessa. ‘I think I’m kinda over it. He says he wants to take me to Turks and Caikos [sic]. I call it Kikes and Jerkoffs…he has this boat. Or says he has a boat. So far, all I’ve seen are fucking pictures. On Instagram. He takes more pictures of that boat than he does of his dick. Whatever.’ ” Or this: “What really galled him was when she said it was ‘okay’ to want to die for a moral cause and went on to invoke burning nuns as if self-immolation was something everyone should aspire to. In the same breath, he admitted there would be something immensely appealing about watching Cara Delevingne, Kendall and Gigi Hadid set themselves on fire in real time on BuzzFeed.” Wagner (Dead Stars, 2012, etc.) knows enough about Hollywood and its denizens to have written a Bret Easton Ellis–style nasty satire. Maybe that book is buried in here somewhere, under the run-on sentences, the scattershot italics, the tedious and constant namedropping, and the five- and seven-page monologues by minor characters, which inevitably contain more italics, namedropping, and demented writing. All that plus the interweaving of a ludicrous melodramatic plot about mistaken parentage, a sex cult, an organ transplant, suicide, and brain trauma is just more than any reader could possibly bear.

The ravings of a writer who is either on drugs or off his meds.