Amazon.com Review
A Victorianesque tale of Los Angeles's elite and waifish children await in Bruce Wagner's third novel,
I'll Let You Go. A forlorn 12-year-old, "Tull" Trotter, distanced from his artist mother due to her drug addiction, is left to his own devices--along with his two privileged cousins, one of whom is grotesquely deformed, wearing hoods of his own design. Mainly set on the sprawling estate of Tull's grandfather (the 18th richest person in America), the children befriend an inner-city orphan (who is protected by a sharp but mentally disturbed homeless man) and embark on solving a mystery that ties these two disparate worlds together.
Ambitious in its design, Wagner's novel adeptly catalogs contemporary America's materialistic preoccupations and its pop culture, sometimes allowing litanies of prescription drugs or opulent goods to impart meaning. Wagner's prose can be moving or exacting ("One side of the newfound grandfather's face sank down a bit as if today it had decided to sleep in"), but too often alliteration almost inexcusably appears: "Twitching in troubled sleep, Pullman's was the only familiar face, but even the Dane was creepily confabulated, a dogpatch of ill-fitting body parts amid Tull's tule fog REM." If you are in the mood for a Dickensian cast of characters and L.A.'s two-dimensional gloss on the world, then I'll Let You Go is for you. --Michael Ferch
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
In previous novels, Wagner (I'm Losing You; Force Majeure) has made a reputation as a sharp-eyed registrar of Beverly Hills mores. His new novel attempts an Angelino Bleak House, describing the gulf that yawns between the ungodly rich and the ungainly poor. On his wedding night, eccentric Hollywood agent Marcus Wiener deserts his heiress bride, Katrina "Trinnie" Trotter, and apparently disappears from the face of the earth. Trinnie tells her son, Toulouse, his father is dead, but when Toulouse is 13 he finds out that isn't true. Unsurprisingly, the news comes from his nosy cousin, Lucy, who is digging around in family secrets attempting to write a detective novel. Although Toulouse and his cousins, Lucy and Edward, are children, they have the precocious manners of adults in contrast to their wealthy parents, who exhibit the immaturity of teenagers. Meanwhile, in a shack under a freeway overpass, Will'm, a large, crazy vagrant, is trying to protect 11-year-old Amaryllis, whose crack-smoking, abusive mother has been murdered. The mystery of Wiener's disappearance and the mystery of the murder of Amaryllis's mother connect the divergent worlds of ad hoc shacks and Bel-Air mansions. This time around, Wagner's observations of L.A.'s filthy rich are curiously torpid, probing little beyond their penchant for purchasing esoteric designer labels. He's better at trawling the nightmarish shelters and abandoned buildings of the street poor. In the end, Wagner's novel is less Dickens than a knockoff of Tom Wolfe and second-rate Wolfe at that but the fustian language and over-the-top melodrama could translate well to the silver screen. 6-city author tour. (Jan. 9)Forecast: L.A. readers will best appreciate this fiercely L.A.-centric novel, but the allure of the City of Angels and Wagner's ability to charm reviewers John Updike is his most famous champion should move a significant number of copies country-wide.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
