But his works, especially those of his career’s second half, exhibit no nostalgia for the bygone literary days of Melville or James or Faulkner or Bellow. Instead, inside the labyrinths of their plots, Wagner unsparingly includes so much of the vertiginous present — the icons of celebrity culture, the argot of internet folkways, New Age religion’s frauds and adepts, the criminal undergrounds and abovegrounds of desperately poor and unfathomably rich transgressors, the expanding universe of gender and sexual identities — as to make the venerable novel form not only novel once more, but almost unrecognizable