Beautiful Ruins by
Jess Walter
If you are still looking for a Christmas gift for the reader
in your family, male or female, I think they’ll thank you for placing Beautiful Ruins under the tree well into
the new year. And you’ll enjoy the
sound of their laughs-out-loud as they turn the pages.
I don’t recall what prompted me to read Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter a few months ago. I had never heard of him although he
has written five other successful novels, including The Zero, a
National Book Award novel about 9/11 and The
Financial Lives of Poets, a
satire on our economic crisis. Nor
do I recall anyone recommending the book.
So I am so thankful that somehow I stumbled onto it because it is a GEM.
I’m going to fudge a little here and copy the description of
the book on the front flap of the book cover because it summarizes so much so
well (and frankly, I still have a lot of Christmas shopping to do) and then
delve into some of my personal favorite highlights. There is way too much to talk about. The beautiful and funny writing, the
unique and so varied characters, the settings—Italy, Hollywood, Idaho, the
Northwest.
From the book jacket:
The story begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched
Italian coastline, a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over
the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall,
thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, he
soon learns, an American starlet, and she is dying.
What unfolds is a dazzling, yet deeply human, roller coaster of
a novel, spanning fifty years and nearly as many lives. From the lavish set of
"Cleopatra" to the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival,
Walter introduces us to the tangled lives of a dozen unforgettable characters:
the star-struck Italian innkeeper and his long-lost love; the heroically
preserved producer who once brought them together and his idealistic young
assistant; the army veteran turned fledgling novelist and the rakish Richard
Burton himself, whose appetites set the whole story in motion--along with the
husbands and wives, lovers and dreamers, superstars and losers, who populate their
world in the decades that follow. Gloriously inventive, constantly surprising,
"Beautiful Ruins" is a story of flawed yet fascinating people,
navigating the rocky shores of their lives while clinging to their improbable
dreams.
I’ll start my comments with Jess
Walter’s writing. One book
reviewer calls his work a literary miracle. Walter captures scenes that create
beautiful imagery. For example,
the opening scene in the tiny fictional Italian coastal village of Porto
Vergogna
She (the dying American actress) arrived in a boat that motored into the
covey, lurched past the rock jetty, and bumped against the end of the pier...All
around her shards of sunlight broke on the flickering waves. Twenty meters away
Pasquale Tursi was attempting to construct a beach under his family’s empty
Pensione (Hotel). He watched as if in a dream or as he would think later, a
dream’s opposite--a burst of clarity after a lifetime of sleep. Chest deep in the cold Ligurian sea,
Pasquale was tossing rocks the size of cats in an attempt to fortify the
breakwater, to keep the waves from hauling away his little mound of
construction sand. Pasquale’s “beach” was only as wide as two fishing boats and
the ground beneath his dusting of sand was scalloped rock. It was the closest thing to a flat
piece of shoreline in the entire village.
When the actress Dee Moray smiles
at him Pasquale falls in love and would
remain in love for the rest of his life—not so much with the woman, whom he
didn’t even know, but with the moment.
What follows is a description of
the ancient dilapidated hotel, the improbable beach designed purposely to
attract wealthy Americans such as the Kennedys, the plans to build a tennis
court on a jutting piece of rock—all as futile and ridiculous as the name
itself: Hotel Adequate View.
Another example of Walter’s way
with words: Porto Vergogna
translates as Port of Shame-so called because it was once a place where sailors
and sardine fishermen could find women of “a certain moral and commercial
flexibility”.
Although filled with boundless
comic passages, a favorite I cannot resist enticing you with is that of Michael
Deane, the once famous Hollywood producer of the 70’s and 80’s, the “Deane of
Hollywood” now reduced to producing a reality dating show called Hookbook.
The first impression one gets of Deane is a man constructed of wax. It
may be impossible to trace the sequence of facials, spa treatments, mud baths,
cosmetic procedures, lifts and staples, collagen implants, outpatient
touch-ups, tannings, Botox injections, cyst and growth removals and stem-cell
injection that have caused a 72-year old man to have the face of a 9-year old
Filipino girl.
Trying to picture what Michael Deane looked like as a young man
in Italy fifty years ago is like standing on Wall Street trying to understand
the topography of Manhattan Island before the Dutch arrived.
Moving on to characters and plots We’ve
all read novels with multiple plots emerging and wondering how they would all
pull together satisfactorily by the end of the book. Often, we feel we’ve been manipulated or perhaps the
culmination was a little unrealistic.
Not so with this story. It
comes together beautifully and leaves one with a sense that all is well with
the human condition. In a sense it
is also good vs. evil (not blatantly like Star Wars) but more like in It’s a Wonderful Life or Willie Wonkie (all good deeds Charlie shall be rewarded...or something like that).
One storyline is with young and
very likeable film student Claire, who works for producer Deane reading scripts,
hoping to discover the next literary masterpiece but instead being inundated
with realty TV show pitches featuring drunk models or sex addicts—scripts so
offensive that to give them the green light for production would be akin to
“singlehandedly hastening the apocalypse.” Should she take the new job offer at the new Film Museum--
and while dumping her old job should she also dump her boyfriend whose favorite
pastime is girlie shows and strip clubs?
Then there’s Shane Wheeler, another
down on his luck wannabee screenwriter who is about to, against all odds,
successfully pitch a movie to Deane called “Donner!” Yes, it’s about the Donner
party and story comprises one entire chapter. We find ourselves also rooting for Shane who for all of his
young life lived with the philosophy his loving parents instilled: act as if
you can do something and you can do it. This creed has served him well until
recently.
Then there is Elvis, a failed
American writer and alcoholic veteran. As a once a year visitor to the Hotel
Adequate View, he leaves his World War II novel in his room—actually just the
lone chapter he continually rewrites every year for two weeks each summer.
Then there is the cameo appearance
of the real life Richard Burton who is in Italy for the filming of Cleopatra—the scandal-ridden Elizabeth Taylor/Richard
Burton epic, with a budget of about 300 million of today’s dollars. I thought the title Beautiful Ruins referred to the rock
formations on the Italian coast but it
appears that Burton himself might be the ruin they are referring to. They describe a scene where he appeared
on the Dick Cavett show in the 80’s, at age 54, looking quite ruined.
And of course, the main
characters—Dee Moray, the American actress and Pasquale Tursi. I do not want to give a plot spoiler
and reveal how and why all these characters unite to bring the novel to a
satisfying conclusion. Perhaps it is the Hollywood influence but one can almost
hear the swelling soundtrack at the end.
If you are a fan of audio books, I
highly recommend that you listen to this one instead of read it as the narrator,
Edwardo Balarini, brings
Pasquale to life with his beautiful Italian accent. Ladies, you will fall in
love with this sweet and humble, azure-eyed Italian. In my book, he joins the
ranks of Heathcliff and Rhett Butler.
Beautiful Ruins is a great
escape read and storytelling at its best with the right blend of pathos and
comedy.
Merry Christmas to all ...and to
all a good book.
