"The Marvelous Universe": Bruce Wagner's novel that explores the madness and glamour of Los Angeles

Nothing is ever that far away. I mean, in The Marvelous Universe of Bruce Wagner, you might think you're going to leave your life connected to your cell phone, glued to social media, but in reality, you won't . Because in that plot , social media will be fundamental, and you'll even see the typography, language, and narrative codes you navigate every minute of your life when you don't have a novel in hand.

But of course the experience changes, it thickens, it has a real cognitive impact, and the depth of ideas returns to what it was before hyperconnectivity . Walden edited a novel that was discarded for being politically incorrect in a time when even that doesn't matter. It seems that reading doesn't even matter anymore, so that's why Walden also scoffed at that other fact: Marvelous Universe (Walden Publisher) has more than 500 pages and not a single one is left over.

There's a subtitle for the novel that reads like this: An actress announces on Instagram that she has a degenerative disease and gains millions of followers. A writer drives an Uber and tries to save himself by playing scratch-off games. A girl with schizophrenia convinces herself that her life is a Marvel movie. A famous sitcom producer tries to rebuild his life after being canceled. A femme fatale poses as Elon Musk's daughter to scam people.

The paths of these characters— whose destinies are linked by violence and the search for redemption —will intersect and take unexpected directions as the world hurtles toward the coronavirus pandemic. And that's fine; the theme is everything that happens in each of these stories.

The lives that add up to these tangents and the immoralities that arise in each scene. Wagner has no limits when developing his characters . In any case, the limit must be set when one begins to prejudge them.

This existential and moral excess the author exploits in his characters functions as an infinite resource. At some point, one begins to expect any kind of madness in each of their worlds. In other words, we barely know what the Uber driver, who was also a writer, is capable of, and who, in turn, will meet an unexpected end.

There are so many things to think about in the development of each character that there's no room to wait for those endings that are like attack-and-explosion scenes where everything you've been thinking about can explode at any moment.

Bruce Wagner was born in Wisconsin, USA, in 1954. He is the author of twelve novels . In 1993, he published the comic Wild Palms , which was turned into a television series produced by Oliver Stone. He is the screenwriter of the films A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987, Chuck Russell), Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills (1989, Paul Bartel), and Maps to the Stars (2014, David Cronenberg). He lives in Los Angeles, which is always his setting, with a focus on Hollywood; a mixture of illusion and madness, glamour and decadence.

There's also something of a chronicler in him, based on two informal details that the publisher hints at: first, that he was a limousine driver in that region, and second, that he could be a sort of disciple of Carlos Castaneda. Rather than examining these two characteristics of his personal life, or his training in producing what he writes, it's better to take them and bring them to light in this novel, so ironic, dizzying, and realistic. An excess of modern life with an Instagram filter and vaccines against a swine flu virus.

And then there's the pop power. The cameos by Kim Kardashian, Billie Eilish, Kanye West, and Leonard Cohen are quite compelling because, a priori, they draw attention to the irony of these appearances in relation to their work. Especially the one about the richest and most talented rapper of that generation. He also doesn't overlook all his religious scheming to add allegories and decadence to the novel's characters.

Those who pay close attention to these pop connections will also be able to compare some of these characters with social media celebrities . Those who rise and fall in the popularity ladder as if they were on a bullet train, but with the tracks leading to heaven.

For all the above, which is almost nothing about one of the best stories to be read this year in Buenos Aires , it remains for another time to measure the decline of our city of lights with that of Los Angeles. It seems that Marvelous Universe is like its version of 100 Years of Solitude but with magical realism turned upside down, and for that reason, sensational and unexpected.

With the rise of "Meta-capitalism," family tradition is all you find on the street today. From a cat, a cell phone, and a scratch-off card to a fake daughter of Elon Musk, a woman with feathers, an editor with cancer, or, downright, your death sentence as the most wonderful love.

You know, nothing is ever that far away. Not even Hollywood and its stars with millions in their banks and millions on their social media accounts. All that's left is to get sick and give that pain a good narrative, so that, from one day to the next, you can get closer to that superstar who seems to live on another planet.

A gesture from this new world brilliantly integrated into this text. A fact that, as exaggerated as it may seem in Wagner's pen, could happen tomorrow. Because you never know who might end up president or what would happen if you won a fortune in a game of chance.

The Marvelous Universe , by Bruce Wagner (Walden publisher).