Roar

Wagner (I’m Losing You) spins a delightful fictional oral history of the Zelig-like Roger “Roar” Orr over eight decades. Roar is alternately or concurrently an esteemed novelist, playwright, film director, poet, physician, and philosopher, and was working with Michelle Obama on a Toni Morrison adaptation for Netflix before his death in 2018 (“Roar saw all sides of a story. That’s what made him a great director, a great storyteller,” she says of him). When Roar was a young man hanging out with the beat poets in the 1950s and ’60s, Allen Ginsberg twice gave him the clap (so says Beverly D’Angelo). In 1964, he starred in Miloš Forman’s first film, and later received multiple Academy Awards. His 2008 novel The Jungle Book, which he wrote after learning his biological mother was Black, is cited by poet Amanda Gorman as an early influence. The absurdity of Wagner’s conceit amounts to an implausible range of career achievements and praise, though the figures weighing in on Roar’s work often have incisive things to say, especially when Roar courts controversy, such as with an all-white film adaptation of Sammy Davis Jr.’s memoir: “The shit got complicated,” says Spike Lee; Dave Chappelle, in praise, vows to remake it. Wagner’s steel-trap knowledge of the entertainment world and fantastical imagination keep readers along for the ride. Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Nov.)