I'll Let You Go: A Novel - Softcover

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

"[Wagner] slices open the self-satisfied bosom of Los Angeles yet again in his third novel, a sprawling family saga that trades the usual mush-mouthed sentimentalities for cascading shards of knife-edged vignettes. A masterful, modern-day fantasy of millionaires and madmen, fathers and sons, reality and dreams."
--Kirkus Reviews
Bruce Wagner's I'm Losing You was hailed as "outrageous -- dead-on in every way" by Janet Maslin in "The New York Times. "New York magazine's Walter Kirn called it "the year's best book." And John Updike, in "The New Yorker, wrote that Bruce Wagner "writes like a wizard." In I'll Let You Go, Wagner offers a stunning novel that surpasses anything he's done before.
Twelve-year-old Toulouse "Tull" Trotter lives on his grandfather's vast Bel-Air parkland estate with his mother, the beautiful, drug-addicted Katrina, a landscape artist who specializes in topiary laby-rinths. He spends most of his time with his young cousins Lucy, the girl detective, and Edward, a prodigy undaunted by the disfiguring effects of Apert Syndrome. One day, an impulsive revelation from Lucy sets in motion a chain of events that changes Tull -- and the Trotter family -- forever.
Though the story unfolds in contemporary Los Angeles, the reader hears echoes of Proust and 1,001 Nights as Toulouse seeks his lost father, a woman finds her lost love, and a family of unimaginable wealth learns that its fate is tied to those of the orphan Amaryllis (who officially aspires to be a saint) and her protector, a courtly giant of a homeless schizophrenic -- both of them on the run from the law. Along a path shaded by murder and mysticism, we meet such unforgettable characters asFitzsimmons, a deranged former social worker; the enterprising Monasterio family of servants (Candelaria, Epitacio, and Eulogio); "Someone-Help-Me," a streetwise devil; and Pullman, a seemingly ageless Great Dane.
Complexly wrought, deeply moving, and scathingly ironic, I'll Let You Go dazzles the reader with the unique blend of gorgeous prose, acerbic wit, and deep emotion that are the specific province of Bruce Wagner.