I'll let you go : a novel /

Draped in Hermes scarves and munching on the rarest of truffles, the Trotter family is the epitome of culture and Beverly Hills dysfunction. Louis Trotter, the family patriarch, is spending a good deal of time commissioning mausoleum models and prowling cemeteries in preparation for the hereafter, and his wife, Bluey, drifts back from dementia only long enough to eat her favorite pomegranate pastries. Their daughter, Katrina, designs garden mazes when she's not in the drug-induced stupor that helps her cope with the labyrinth of secrets she keeps from her son, but Tull is an intuitive boy who unwittingly begins to stumble upon information that will reveal a long-held family secret. Wagner revels in the opulent lifestyles of his eccentric cast of characters, and true to his voyeuristic approach, he requests the reader's indulgence in allowing him this luxurious revelry. This novel is an industrious endeavor, which could have been shortened about 100 pages, but there are so many interesting characters dynamically incorporated into its delightfully twisted plot, it's well worth the time. --Elsa Gaztambide

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. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

The publisher is quite excited about film director Wagner's third novel, set in Beverly Hills. Young Tull Trotter, who lives in isolated splendor with his off-kilter socialite mom, accidentally discovers that the father might still be alive. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

The author of I'm Losing You (1996) 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. Wagner sets up his cast with masterly ease. The closest thing we have to a protagonist is 12-year-old Toulouse (Tull) Trotter, who walks his mighty Dane, Pullman, around his sidewalk-less Bel-Air neighborhood. His mother Trinnie (short for Katrina) has been sober all of six months and still seems to be crashing from the weight of having husband Marcus up and disappear one night just after they were married. The vine-choked ruins of the house and garden built for the couple by her richer-than-Croesus father, Louis Trotter, still stand nearby the sprawling estate where she and Tull live with Grandpa Lou. Tull forms a tight, spoiled knot of jet-setting junior-high privilege with his cousins: Lucy, a tense trend-monger who's deeply in love with Tull and sticks her nose into everyone's affairs under the guise of researching a novel she'll never write; and Edward, a young genius, born physically deformed by the effects of Apert's Syndrome, who designs and sews the Taymor-esque masks and hoods he wears. Their world is momentarily punctured by meeting another young teenager, Amaryllis, who is tossed into the hellish machinery of juvenile placement after her drug-addicted mother dies. The cousins do what they can to help Amaryllis while Tull and Lucy search for Marcus, whom Trinnie had claimed until recently was dead. There are ample moments here for easy satiric thrusts, but, happily, Wagner keeps his focus on his people. Meanwhile, his prose is looping and elegant, yet thoroughly grounded in the day-to-day vernacular of southern California's self-obsessed elite. If Bret Easton Ellis had immersed himself for several years in 18th-century tales of the decadent French aristocracy, picking up a few hints from Michael Tolkin along the way, this is what you might get. A masterful, modern-day fantasy of millionaires and madmen, fathers and sons, reality and dreams. Author tour