Hooray for Hollywood

Without knowing anything about Bruce Wagner, the casual reader of his three novels to date, “Force Majeure,” “I’m Losing You” and now, weighing in at a page count only a few hundred shy of “The Brothers Karamazov,” “I’ll Let You Go,” would surmise that the author works primarily as a screenwriter in Hollywood; that his core audience is a claque of Hollywood people who think he’s the cat’s pajamas; that he has a more diffuse audience of fans who write landfill for men’s magazines and who would like to become Hollywood screenwriters; that Wagner’s relationships in the movie business are so determining of how he constructs a novel that even a book with little direct bearing on Hollywood reads like an artificially prose-enriched screenplay in which actual Hollywood figures that Wagner approves of, like Diane Keaton and Gus Van Sant, appear as fawned-over walk-on characters while other real people from movie-land whom Wagner dislikes or views as his overrated competition are periodically slagged by his fictional characters. Robert Towne, for example, is invariably referred to, disparagingly, as Robert Chinatowne.

Wagner’s longueurs of fawning and sniping might be considered minor irritants in a more blatantly malicious novel like “I’m Losing You,” which tried to engage the shopworn theme of Hollywood soul-murder in a brisk, peripatetic way and occasionally succeeded. (“Force Majeure” made the telling mistake of using an unsuccessful screenwriter as a protagonist and reads like a piercing whine from the gilded bowels of a not-especially punishing hell.)

In “I’ll Let You Go,” a smarmy, lumbering, sentimental yet strikingly gelid novel pretending to be a bighearted, empathetic picaresque of human folly, these bits of apparently irresistible inside-the-circus-tent jeering and breech-kissing are, in the lingo of Minsky’s, real showstoppers, spinning the reader’s mind away from the question “Why am I reading this?” which hovers between eye and page throughout most of this book to the even more disturbing one, “Why is he writing this?”

Only a reviewer has a ready-made answer to the first question, and even a reviewer with a much larger capacity for tripe than my own would find the first 40 or 50 pages of “I’ll Let You Go” unbearably mannered, precious, condescending and fake in every conceivable way. Every setting resembles the maquette of a theater proscenium instead of the real world; the actors who pirouette across Wagner’s various toy stages have the verisimilitude of marionettes.

This book, briefly, is about a family, the Trotters, rich beyond mortal dreams and exampled by three generations of deeply troubled compulsive shoppers; an African American waif, Amaryllis, and her dark journey through homelessness and the foster care system; and a former William Morris agent, married 20 years earlier, and still technically married, to a scioness of the Trotter family. He had a schizophrenic breakdown on their wedding night and disappeared, reincarnating himself in the twilight world of shelters and skid rows as the original, i.e., Pre-Raphaelite, William Morris, a burly and wild-mouthed but gentle giant of a man who befriends Amaryllis and tries to protect her from the ghastly world of Children’s Services, as do three unutterably precocious Trotter children, Toulouse (also called Tull, child of scioness and mad agent), and his cousins Edward and Lucy, who meet her during their visit to a downtown film set where their friend, a child star named Boulder, is shooting a movie.

After constructing an elaborate, cumbersome narrative apparatus that allows him to cut back and forth between the manias and madcap whimsies of the Trotter clan (whose limitless expenditures and capriciously grandiose acquisitions Wagner catalogs in adoringly fetishistic detail), the contrastingly hairy perils of Amaryllis and the mock-Victorian odyssey of William Morris, Wagner has also given most of his connect-the-dots plot away.

What remains is several hundred pages in which coincidence, near-encounters and other filmic devices for contriving suspense compete with chunks of arcane research, stuffed into the narrative like chestnuts into a Christmas goose, concerning all manner of rarefied subjects, from mortuary architecture to garden lore to the chemistry of anti-psychotic drugs to secrets of the confectioner’s art. The last is so central to this book’s notion of a leitmotif that it leaves a thin coating of powdered sugar on virtually every scene, even the ones splattered with vomit and excrement.

The Trotters are forever tucking into expanses of richly inventive pastry and other breathtaking food; Amaryllis’ few happy moments, during much of her torment, are gustatory in nature. The long-missing husband with delusions of grandeur comes from a somewhat depressingly middle-class Jewish family of dessert makers and the manufacture of very special goodies featuring pomegranates as the key ingredient is the fingerprint he leaves wherever his delusional rovings allow him to come temporarily to rest.

We know within a few excruciating chapters that the facially disfigured and in other ways handicapped Edward will eventually die, that the schizophrenic agent and his abandoned bride Katrina will be reunited after a lot of push-pull and that the waif will find a good home, and even marry a billionaire, by the whimpering, autumnal conclusion of this seemingly endless saga; what most of the secondary figures do is equally predictable, at least in the sense that habitual modes of extravagance and unreality define these characters as carefully charted plot points rather than as actual human beings.

It doesn’t help that “I’ll Let You Go” is written in the florid manner of a bodice-ripper aping Dickens, a style that foreshadows every twist and turn from a considerable distance (at exhaustive, exhausting length, replete with asides and footnotes suggesting how we should feel about what we’re reading and letting us know that only the “cynical” reader could find it preposterous) so that by the time something happens (when William, for instance, is wrongly arrested for the motel strangling of Amaryllis’ mother), the title of this book has become an extremely empty promise.

What we’re not prepared for, and perhaps not really meant to notice, is that “I’ll Let You Go” springs into real life, in the novelistic sense, somewhere rather far along in the book, when the adorably inquisitive Trotter kids (Lucy is writing a detective story account of the search for Tull’s father), accompanied as always by Edward’s great Dane, Pullman (by far the most fully fleshed Trotter family member), descend from the enormously expensive and absurdly large vehicle they normally travel about in to visit the shabby-genteel Redlands home of character Marcus Weiner’s parents.

It should never be said that Wagner doesn’t do his homework; most of this book reads like homework, a meticulous fantasy construction of the lives of the super-rich and the super-poor woven out of unimaginable research and not much close observation or experience. The bravely striving, quotidian world of Harry and Ruth Weiner, their tchotchkes and photo albums and scrubby backyard, however, is rendered with an authenticity and familiarity entirely absent from the rest of this novel.

Indeed, even when Harry and Ruth are planted in the artificed realms of criminal court or one of the Trotters’ opulent dining rooms, they intrude a jarring note of reality into what, for all its episodes of violence, insanity, internecine antagonisms, rapes, batterings and shopping sprees, never quite feels like anything that did ever happen or could ever happen. To put it another way, the Weiners are like cinema verite footage spliced into an interminable and cozily trite special effects film called “All’s Well That Ends Well, If You Have a Lot of Money.”

I’m not sure if this answers the question “Why is he writing this?” but “I’ll Let You Go” feels more like a book meant to flatter and impress a coterie without much interest in literature beyond its utility for cinematic mutilation than a work wrenched from anywhere like home. It tells us that the unbelievably rich suffer just as you and I do and that the terribly poor can make it through their nightmare if they really try. The possibility that many of us, including some of this moment’s gilded claque, will wind up living the sedate, unspectacular lives of Harry and Ruth Weiner at the end of our days is the one possibility this novel refuses to entertain, a refusal that begins to sound, after a few hundred pages, a lot like the lyrics of “Hooray for Hollywood.”

*

Gary Indiana is the author of “Depraved Indifference,” “Three Month Fever” and “Resentment: A Comedy.”