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I'll Let You Go: A Novel

por Bruce Wagner

MiembrosReseñasPopularidadValoración promediaMenciones
893301,432 (4.09)2
"[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 as Fitzsimmons, 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.… (más)
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Captivating madness: For seven eighths of this book, I was astonished by Wagner's writing skill. His flawless evocation of the Dickensian novel is intercut with bits of modern dialogue that are shocking in their compellingly contemporary grounding. The characters are fully realized and sometimes alarmingly grotesque. Horrific things happen to the luckless, impoverished females in this book; descriptions of the horrors visited upon them are harrowing in their specifics. The author has great insight into the inner lives of children, both rich and poor; he knows of their secret dreams and fears and takes us with them on their journeys to freedom--both physical and psychological. His characters, particularly Topsy/Will'm and the baker Gilles, the grandfather Trotter, and the birth-defective, brilliant Edward and his impulsive sister Lucy, the orphaned and abused Amaryllis, are also Dickensian in their great passions and flaws. Sadly, about 75 pages from the end, the narrative wobbles badly when it moves into emails back and forth between the children, and letters between the adults. This contemporary segment, with little of the previous lavish language present, simply isn't as compelling as what came before. Fortunately, Wagner recovers to deliver an ending that is realistic in terms of the characters he's created. But those 50-60 pages near the end are overwrought and detract from an otherwise splendid accomplishment. That said, I recommend this book for its extraordinary vocabulary, its brand-name roster of designers and stars of every ilk, and for a gripping tale told in incredible style.
1 vota mugwump2 | Nov 29, 2008 |
this is the best novel i've read in a decade or more! it's a charming story about an eccentric group of kids and their families living (and dying) in los angeles. it wavers between gritty and heartbreaking, and magical with a touch of the sort of fantasy that great films are made of. it reads like a film (and was penned by a screenwriter). i savored every page and was sorry to see it come to an end. it's a gem! ( )
1 vota shobhana | Aug 8, 2008 |
What is it about Charles Dickens that holds such sway over today’s fiction writers? There’s something about the Great Bearded One that makes many a writer go ga-ga with plot, character and metaphor.

Shout the word “Dickensian€? in a crowded shopping mall (especially around Yuletide) and you’ll have hundreds of people conjuring images of cherub-cheeked uncles, fortunes lost, fortunes gained, wizened misers, lovelorn old maids, grime-cheeked orphans and whip-wielding schoolmasters.

Say “Dickensianâ€? at a literary soiree and you’ll get two out of three authors thinking, “Hey, he’s talking about me.â€?

Among them, Bruce Wagner.

Unlike some modern novelists who distance themselves from Chuck D. by saying the resemblance is purely coincidental, Wagner (Force Majeur, I’m Losing You) goes full-out with Pickwickian gusto in I’ll Let You Go, a 549-page saga chockfull of characters that would make Mr. D. proud as Pumblechook. Wagner not only wears Dickens on his sleeve, he had a portrait of the author taped to the wall above his desk as he was writing this novel.

“Years ago, I bought one of his letters and had it hanging on the wall while I wrote,â€? he said in a recent interview. “It was framed along with an etching of him gazing out. When I finally finished the book, I thanked Mr. Dickens, then promptly sold it. His stare became too intimidating!â€?

Daunting or not, the Ghost of Victorian Writers Past clots every sentence of I’ll Let You Go. The plot and its cast of characters is big—make that, Big—and busy. At its center is twelve-year-old Toulouse “Tullâ€? Trotter who lives on his grandfather’s Bel-Air estate with his mother, Katrina, a topiary designer strung-out on drugs and despair. Like Great Expectations’ Miss Havisham, Katrina was abandoned on her wedding night shortly after Tull was conceived (or so the young lad has been led to believe). Tull has spent much of his life pondering his long-lost father (who, according to Katrina, was killed in a snowmobile accident).

His paternal search is about to reach closure, thanks to the huge cast of characters Wagner throws into this stew of a book—all of them crashing into each other, bumping and spinning off into a dizzying series of coincidence and that old standby, deus ex machina. He even includes a cast list of “principal charactersâ€? prior to the book’s first, jet-propelled paragraph. For starters, there are Tull’s close friends, his cousins Lucy and Edward. Lucy, in typical L.A. ambition, is determined to be a published author before she hits puberty (current project: The Mystery of the Blue Maze); Edward, suffering from the disfiguring Apert’s disease, is a tragic figure a la young Paul Dombey (apropos of nothing, but yet everything, his name, Edward Aurelius Trotter, spells EAT).

Also vying for ink-space in I’ll Let You Go: patriarch Louis Aherne Trotter, who collects anything associated with the name Louis (like Louis XIV furniture) and who is obsessed with designing his gravesite; his Alzheimer-afflicted wife Bluey who is equally obsessed with clipping obituaries from the daily newspaper; Katrina’s brother Dodd, the eighteenth-richest man in the world; his wife Joyce, currently obsessed with rescuing unwanted babies from dumpsters; Amaryllis Kornfeld, the most Dickensian of orphans, who is shuttled between foster homes and eventually intersects Tull’s life; and, last but certainly not least, an eccentric vagrant named Topsy, aka William Morris, the Victorian poet (Topsy believes he is the long-dead author of News From Nowhere, though in point of fact, he is a former employee of the William Morris talent agency whose brain was long ago scrambled). There are many other characters large and small (Diane Keaton makes a cameo and screenwriter Ron Bass is the butt of a long-running joke), and canine (Tull’s beloved Great Dane Pullman who might just be the wisest character of them all).

The novel plays out in front of a sprawling Hollywood backdrop. The ghost of Nathanael West haunts the corridors of the Trotter mansion as much as Dickens. Wagner, himself a filmmaker, knows his Rodeo Drive and his Mulholland Drive like they were mapped on the back of his hand. Better yet, he knows the characters who live there—the real, the fake, the semi-sincere—and he paints them large on his canvas. Referring to the Trotters, Amaryllis muses, “This family worked in God-like scale!â€? The same could be said for the author.

I’ll Let You Go is big, archaic and ambitious. Metafiction? Hell, this is megafiction, filled with the kind of writing that wrestles readers into submission. Witness, if you dare, this one paragraph from Topsy’s sojourn in Santa Monica:
He spent hours atop a Macy’s bath towel, burning his skin at the shore. The waves lapped relentlessly as is their wont; sunbathers lazed and sortied in pointillist ballet; dusk ushered in the nebulae. He imagined himself illustrated, a hero on a dead world that was tentatively beginning to flower again—saw himself standing tall under empyrean tempera of cloud-scudded sky, replete with William Morris’s beloved Arthurian garb, a gleaming, high-crested morion stuffed onto thickened head, with smoky visor and bentail, fat thighs squeezed into cuisses, wearing epaulieres of rubies plucked from Saturn’s rings, sword and escutcheon raised against bottomless heavens filled with vessels of improbable size disgorging a-hundred-thousand-score armies of desperate, adventuresome men: celestial warriors! Will’m lay on the sand with his recumbent DNA and bore miniscule, magisterial witness to the wonder-book of yawping cosmological eye.
There are plenty of tongue-lapping delights to be had here (“empyrean temperaâ€?!), and for the most part Wagner is up to the task of delivering something on the order of David Copperfield Will Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again. The tongue-tangling style—thick and brooding black on the page—is nicely juxtaposed with the shallow, surface-skimming world of Hollywood. The author has as much satiric fun skewering the cell-phone set as Robert Altman did in his movie The Player.

Trouble is, Wagner doesn’t know when to bring the fun to a close. The book is too long by even the most generous of Dickensian standards (at least ole Charlie D. knew how to bring all the players back on stage for one final bow before we started checking our watches). Wagner reaches for much; but in so doing, grabs hold of less than he’d hoped. I’ll Let You Go loses much of its steam in the third act. What should have been a coda or an epilogue—or one of those noisy chapters crowded with coincidence, mistaken-identities-revealed, and happy fortune of which Dickens was so fond—drags out into a hundred-page chore of denouement. The baleful gaze of the Bearded One hanging over his desk should have been warning enough for him to more quickly wrap up what is otherwise a near-masterpiece.

Draggy finish aside, I’ll Let You Go is well worth the reader’s time and patience. From here, one can only have great expectations for Bruce Wagner’s career. ( )
1 vota davidabrams | Jun 28, 2006 |
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"[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 as Fitzsimmons, 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.

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