Beautiful Ruins

Beautiful Ruins is the kind of novel I had wish I had written. It covers a multitude of subjects, from the making of the film Cleopatra to the Donner Party, and has locations as varied as the Italian coast, Edinburgh, and the mountains of Idaho. Each character is sharply drawn, and there's a genuine suspense that comples us to the end. Author Jess Walter keeps a lot of balls in the air, and he's just able to pull it off.

We start in 1962 in the small coastal village of Porto Vergogna, which is often bypassed by vacationers for more luxurious surroundings. "Vergogna meant shame, and was a remnant from the founding of the village in the seventeenth century as a place for sailors and fishers to find women of ... a certain moral and commercial flexibility."

To this village comes a young actress, Dee Moray, who has a small part in Cleopatra, filming in Rome. She thinks she has stomach cancer. She charms the young man, Pasquale Tursi, running the only hotel, modestly called the Adequate View. He is determined to build a tennis court on the cliffs, until it is pointed out that if a ball goes off the court it will sail into the sea.

We then cut to the present day, when a young producer's assistant, Claire Silver, hears a pitch from a would-be writer, who has a screenplay about the ill-fated Donner Party. Into this meeting bursts Tursi, now an old man and looking for Dee, who did not die. It turns out that Claire's boss, an old Hollywood guy named Michael Deane, was involved in the Dee Moray business.

That's just the barest bones of the story. There is also a failed novelist, Alvis Bender, who visits the Adequate View every year to work on his book, but has only finished one chapter (which we get to read). Pasquale has fathered a son, who lives with his mother in Florence. Dee's son, Pat, a failed rock musician, has an adventure touring in the U.K., which ends with him flat broke in London. And it all culminates at a small theater in Sands Point, Idaho. Did I mention that Richard Burton is a character?

Beautiful Ruins is a very ambitious novel. It takes several different viewpoints and styles--in addition to Bender's one chapter, we get part of the Donner party script, and later a play that has summarized much of the action. At times this was just way too much, and I felt that Walter had gotten off-track, but he does a fine job of bringing it all home, as the book is richly and intricately plotted.

If the action sometimes gets far afield, the prose is worth remarking on. He seems to have a bead on Hollywood: "Claire's Coffee Bean is crowded at seven-thirty, every table sporting a sullen white screenwriter in glasses, every pair of glasses aimed at a Mac Pro laptop, every Mac Pro to a digitized Final Draft script." Of Deane, who is seems modeled on Robert Evans, Walter writes: "The first impression one gets of Michael Deane is of a man constructed of wax, or perhaps prematurely embalmed. After all these years, it may be impossible to trace the sequence of facials, spa treatments, mud baths, implants, outpatient touch-ups, tannings, Botox injections, cyst and growth removals, and stem-cell injections that have a caused a seventy-two-year-old man to have the face of a nine-year-old Filipino girl."

The heart of the book, though, is the Cinque Terre, on the Italian Riviera. Walter writes of it lovingly, as Pasquale shows Dee his country, including a magical visit to leftover pill-box turrets from World War II, where a German soldier painted portraits of a woman. The back and forth between the sleepy world of Porto Vergnona and Hollywood can be bruising: "Perhaps it was the difference in age between the countries--America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians lived in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires."

I enjoyed the book, though I thought it could use some trimming. Some of the characters get more backstory than they are due. Claire and Shane Wheeler, the young screenwriter, get a large buildup but then almost disappear from the story. Also, a play at the end that is supposed to be brilliant doesn't sound all that good to me.  But it's a touching story.