It opens like a movie; you can almost hear the swelling soundtrack, promising a good old-fashioned, escapist story, even as it is imbued with a knowing — and often hilarious — satirical edge. And it ends like a movie, too, with a heaping helping of tied-up satisfaction … Beautiful Ruins is his Hollywood novel, his Italian novel and his Pacific Northwestern novel all braided into one: an epic romance, tragicomic, invented and reported (Walter knows his Cleopatra trivia), magical yet hard-boiled (think García Márquez meets Peter Biskind), with chapters that encompass not just Italy in the ’60s and present-day Hollywood, but also Seattle and Britain and Idaho, plot strands unfolding across the land mines of the last half-century — an American landscape of vice, addiction, loss and heartache, thwarted careers and broken dreams.
The book takes its title from Louis Menand’s New Yorker description of Richard Burton at 54. It takes its essence from Milan Kundera, in a passage about the elusiveness of the present moment. Yet not for nothing is Cleopatra the vortex of the novel: the great Hollywood debacle, the love story as train wreck, the project so crazy it made other, crazier projects look sensible by comparison. And yet it was a romance. Mr. Walter has built his book around Cleopatra as a monument to crazy love.
...lively prose, sharp transitions and an entertaining cast of characters … There are glitches. At times, Walter extends a moment two or three beats too long...At other times, Walter’s dialogue lands heavily … The quick reader will enjoy a plot that’s well constructed and also lively, shuttling fast between parents and long-lost children, books and movies, the Italian village Porto Vergogna with its ‘dozen old whitewashed houses’ and Claire’s coffee shop, where almost every table sports a ‘sullen white screenwriter in glasses, every pair of glasses aimed at a Mac Pro laptop, every Mac Pro open to a digitized Final Draft script.’ Time traveling, cross cutting, inter-textual and cross-cultural, this is The English Patient without the poetry or history.
Interspersed here and there are pages from an unfinished World War II novel, a chapter of a rejected movie-town memoir and several scenes from a Midwestern community-theater play. Such a fractured storytelling system is uniquely suited to a story full of professional and amateur artists trying to grab hold of some mercurial truth and fix it to the page, the screen, the disc, the stage or the canvas … As soon as the sure-handed Jess Walter...sets one story segment in motion, he pulls the reader away to gaze at a different spinning wheel of plot. By this inventive method, heightening interest and maximizing suspense, the book brings several figures together in the fullness of time, all united in a quest for answers to a host of questions big and little, cosmic and personal.
The book begins as a send-up. We Hollywood in all of its crass, commercial glory — washed up stars who refuse to get out of their silk pajamas and greedy studio executives. But the end, we realize the joke is on us … There's a love story in Beautiful Ruins, and it's a good one. But the sharpest parts of the book are the ones that explore the space that film and TV occupy in our world, and how even the most low-budget productions can be genuinely meaningful.
Beautiful Ruins dissects popular media — reality TV's race to the bottom to find the lowest common denominator, story arcs for audiences with the attention span of a flea, bad taste in grotesque abundance … Beautiful Ruins asks: How do you balance desire with doing the right thing? It's the epic struggle of our time, when so much choice is at our fingertips, and finding the right path is correspondingly difficult. Pasquale's mother tells her son the key is balance: ‘what we want to do and what we must do are not the same ... Pasquo, the smaller the place between your desire and what is right, the happier you'll be.’
Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins shows novelists how it is done. The last third of this novel catapults it from being a great read to being darn near profound … Tursi and Moray wonder about the German soldier who must have painted the girl, and how much he loved her, and whether he survived the war. What was his story, and how did it end? Walter tells us the answer in the book's elegiac final chapter, which, like our lives, is an act of imagination and a conclusion that does not conclude. The final third may still be a problem for us, living in reality, but not for Walter, in this beautiful novel.
The [characters’] motives are all over the studio lot, and Walter takes time to give each an extended back story. He's a witty, sharply observant writer, an American version of Nick Hornby, who loves Walter's books. Like Hornby (and like Irving), Walter has done some time in Hollywood and can skewer its pretensions, and like those two writers he has a sentimental streak that needs to be kept on a tight leash … There's a lot of tricky shifting of time and setting that a less experienced novelist wouldn't have attempted and that Walter almost doesn't pull off. His exuberance carries him past whatever problems he creates for himself, and the scripts and memoirs are even funnier than the stock market verse in his last novel, The Financial Lives of the Poets. It's so obvious that Walter's having so much fun with this stuff that it becomes infectious.
Time and setting shift so much in the book's early chapters that the novel initially feels centerless, almost recklessly jumbled. But Walter's aim is clear: He wants to show how even today, when the idea of ‘culture’ has seemingly degraded to reality TV and e-mail forwards of cute otter videos, great art can still transform us … Walter makes each character memorable, in part by accessing their distinct storytelling voices. We read Shane's heartfelt but gloomy film treatment, Michael's straight-talking memoir, and the first chapter of Alvis' autobiographical novel, which he wants to be ‘the sort of funny that makes you sad, too.’ Walter wants that, too: As he moves Pasquale, Michael and Dee toward each other again, decades after their first meeting, the plot is littered with his characters' missed opportunities and dashed ambitions. Yet Beautiful Ruins is enlivened by wisecracks, rude jokes and caustic wit, and if Walter has to choose between cynicism and optimism, he'll pick the latter.
Much of the pleasure of the novel comes from watching Walter ingeniously zip back and forth to connect these loose strands, but it largely succeeds on the comic energy of its prose and the liveliness of its characters. A theme that bubbles under the story is the variety of ways real life energizes great art—Walter intersperses excerpts from his characters’ plays, memoirs, film treatments and novels to show how their pasts inform their best work … Walter’s prose is a joy—funny, brash, witty and rich with ironic twists. He’s taken all of the tricks of the postmodern novel and scoured out the cynicism, making for a novel that's life-affirming but never saccharine.
