Here's a heads-up, however, from someone who recently spent eight hours with I'm Losing You, in his lap: Don't buy the buzz, and forgive Updike the (rare) critical misfire. I'm Losing You is indeed caustic and intermittently brilliant, but any stray fireworks are buried beneath mountains of gassy chat, unfiltered gossip and 100-proof psychobabble.

Wagner does have a good feel for low- and mid-level Hollywood lives. I'm Losing You takes its title from what the book's characters shout during fuzzy cell phone conversations, and this story is studded with tart, throw-away observations, from the shape of one former actress' "I-shit-on-you-mouth" to Hollywood's burgeoning number of "H.I.V.I.P.s" -- industry insiders with AIDS.

What the novel lacks, however, are fleshed-out characters and any sense of narrative arc; the action scrolls past as if under a microscope. Dozens of amoeba-like neurotics emerge briefly from the murk -- producers, porn directors, agents, dermatologists, aging stars -- deliver their brassy monologues, and disappear. Everyone is selling something, and the disposable dialogue is peppered with legions of bold-face names:

"Tell you one thing: Dawn Steel would not do a remake of Pasolini's Teorema. She's too smart for that ... Would still kill for Jane Campion (I BRAKE FOR BERTOLUCCI), but Saul says she's booked for like six years. (He actually suggested Amy Heckerling.) I remain adamantine about having a woman at the helm (that's Chayevskypeak -- remember Bill Holden saying that in Network?"

I'm Losing You is already being compared with Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust and Michael Tolkin's The Player, and Updike's review evoked the ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald. But as talented as Wagner can occasionally be, I'm Losing You -- unlike Tolkin's shrewd and sturdy novel -- evaporates as soon as the final page flickers past. Like a Carrie Fisher book helmed by Oliver Stone, I'm Losing You is arch, creepy, over-the-top -- and infuriatingly static. --Salon

Wagner's bitchy narrative compiles an index of Hollywood types from pathetic wannabes and has-beens to lucky arrivistes and powerbrokers. Their degrees of separation are much lower than you'd expect, forming a daisy-chain of odd relations, with such sites in common as a children-with-AIDS benefit, a New Age seminar, and restaurants where the help is always on the entertainment make. Mostly, though, Wagner's characters speak in manic monologues, and the result is a cacophony of disembodied cellular voices. They include those of the dying wife of a producer, her hot-shot ICM agent-son, a Big Star with a taste for drugs and melodrama, her drug-pushing doctor, and a psychiatrist's son who makes a living cleaning out dead animals from houses. Women sound off in various genres: A producer hoping to remake Pasolini's Teorema pens her memoir á la Julia Phillips; an insane masseuse claims in her manuscript to have conceived the hottest TV shows; a waitress turned porn star commits her aspirations to a diary; and a TV casting director, hoping to be a movie producer, writes letters to her newborn son, blind from birth and rejected by his coke-addled dad. Wagner dips his pen deep in venom for his portraits of truly despicable characters like mega-hit producer Zev Turtletaub, an obnoxious member of the gay elite, who treats his assistant like a sex slave and has little time for his own sister, dying of AIDS.

Much smarter than the recent bunch of novels and movies on Hollywood, and much more believable for its very lack of a narrative hook.