I'll Let You Go

Bruce Wagner Sweeps L.A.

A perplexing new novel from the author of the impressive, unlikable I'm Losing You. Like that cruel and occasionally brilliant effort, I'll Let You Go is an L.A. book to the core ("Nepotism was rampant. Ralph Fiennes had a sister, Martha, who'd turned proud 'helmer'; Ridley Scott's, Larry Kasdan's and Walter Matthau's sons all directed"), and as such would seem to be of interest mainly to the Variety-reading set. But if the subject matter seems too narrow and trendy, I'll Let You Go is, stylistically, immune to literary faddishness. In fact, it's crammed with sentences that sound like they came from…where? A twenty-first-century Victor Hugo? "Bursting from the boxwood, this is what first Trinnie, then Samson, saw: Bluey, in favored negligee that unfavorably revealed her anatomy, sprinting past with spatula in hand, followed by a pink-faced Winter, the former shrieking like a parrot in maddening metronomic intervals while making a beeline for the Len Brackett-designed Pine-Lute Pavilion doghouse." Sentences like these are too overwrought for my taste (and probably, come to think of it, most everyone else's these days), but I suppose credit is due: Wagner wrote the novel he wanted to write.

This is sweeping Dickensian/Balzacian/Tom Wolfeian satire, and the tangly story is interesting in fits and stops. A homeless schizophrenic called "Will'm" ("for that is how he pronounced it") who thinks he's William Morris the Dead Artist, but who turns out to have worked at William Morris the Agency, comes into the lives of three very, very rich children. The worlds of the rich and the poor collide when they all four become friends with a beautiful eleven-year old orphan girl named Amaryllis. Interestingly, the children are the most complex characters in the book; the adults, especially the rich ones, are unrepentantly materialistic and vile (the author makes the fatal Bret Easton Ellisian mistake of allowing brand names to mean something).

Wagner is doubtless a smart, talented writer, but there's a sense in which I'll Let You Go seems to be lacking in that most essential of writerly virtues, empathy. A monumentally ambitious but ultimately shallow book.

Adrienne Miller is Esquire's literary editor.

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