A review by sophiahelix
I'll Let You Go by Bruce Wagner
5.0
I read this in college and happily it is just as fantastic as I remembered. The ultra-rich and the starving poor in modern-day Beverly Hills, bitter screenwriters, children who charter their own round-the-world private jet trip and stop off at Easter Island, a brilliant, snarky, deformed ten year old boy who sews his own hoods, cousin-on-cousin incest, a crackhead's daughter who's obsessed with becoming a Jewish saint just like her hero Edith Stein and who cycles through a series of horrible foster homes, a man who's been living under the delusion that he is William Morris the Enlightenment-era textile designer and writer, and all the descriptions of designer clothing and life on the streets of LA you could ask for, plus a great dane named Pullman.
And it has an ENDING. Not the most perfect one, but unlike almost all the mainstream fiction I've read recently, it doesn't either cut out abruptly or add in a new storyline only to finish it off in fifteen pages instead of the hundred it needs. The storylines wind to gentle conclusions with a brief coda that works, and I came away feeling both a little happier and a little sadder.
And it has an ENDING. Not the most perfect one, but unlike almost all the mainstream fiction I've read recently, it doesn't either cut out abruptly or add in a new storyline only to finish it off in fifteen pages instead of the hundred it needs. The storylines wind to gentle conclusions with a brief coda that works, and I came away feeling both a little happier and a little sadder.