Joining 1996's I'm Losing You and 2002's I'll Let You Go, Bruce Wagner's latest Hollywood burlesque, Still Holding, concludes his loosely associated "cell phone trilogy," in which each title is a phrase commonly used by people barking into their handhelds. Holstered by tacit law to every citizen in Los Angeles County, cell phones are highly evocative of Wagner's world of disconnection, impermanence, and free-floating anxiety, populated by flaky characters who aren't stable enough for a landline. It would be hard for any novelist to get a handle on a place that's only as stable as its tectonic plates, but Wagner–who has had plenty of dalliances with the industry himself, most notably as writer of the surreal miniseries Wild Palms–knows Hollywood with a familiarity that breeds limitless contempt. There's a beating heart under his amusingly scabrous appraisal of insiders and fringe-dwellers alike, but he generally only dredges up sympathy for the damned after subjecting them to humiliation. Elegantly structured out of short, punchy vignettes that draw its three principal characters into a tight orbit, Still Holding convinces more in its moral disgust than in its clanking ironies and 11th-hour compassion. Dropping more names than a Bret Easton Ellis novel, Wagner mingles his fictional creations with up-to-the-minute players and productions. A mercurial young superstar engaged to the star of a long-running TV sitcom, Kit Lightfoot loses everything when a jilted fan brains him with a bottle. In one of the book's many too-neat ironies, Kit was preparing to star as a developmentally disabled character in the new movie by Requiem For A Dream's Darren Aronofsky, but he suffers brain damage after the assault. Wagner's other protagonists are outsiders: Lisanne, an overweight spinster left pregnant after a fling with her high-school boyfriend, obsesses over Kit to such an extent that she embraces his fashionable Buddhism and names her child Siddhama. Meanwhile, aspiring actress Becca gets mired in the grungy parallel universe of celebrity lookalikes, appearing as Drew Barrymore at parties and conventions until Spike Jonze decides to make a movie about the phenomenon. The behind-the-scenes perversions in Still Holding can be hair-raising and graphic: Lisanne finds spiritual nirvana in cleaning toilets without gloves, Kit's former fiancée hooks up with his best friend and demands a porn star's consummation, and Becca gets mixed up in an impromptu orgy with a Russell Crowe lookalike and an officious couple living off the millions they won in a lawsuit over their infant son's death. With equal parts revulsion and pity, Wagner views these incidents as the rites of the spiritually and morally vacant, people so wrapped up in celebrity culture that their own identities are lost in the ether. Still Holding may strike some as unduly harsh; unlike other Hollywood satires, it may leave its targets too discomfited to consider themselves in on the joke.