Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter
"There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact." -Milan Kundera (opens the last chapter, with the title name)
Fast Facts
- Walter has been a finalist for the National Book Award and won an Edgar Allen Poe award
- Journalist-turned novelist
- Beautiful Ruins (a great name for a book) took him 15 years to write
- He provides an afterward explaining how obnoxious this admission is, and detailing his blue collar work ethic and approach - it made me love him even more
- Do you want to travel to a small Italian village and fall in love?
- You do? Then just buy this book. Immediately.
- Funny and down-to-earth and descriptive and a great, engaging story
- Time period jumping, character jumping, stylistic jumping - Walter does it all, and does it well
- This book is an easy-to-digest joy. Judge it by its cover and enjoy how delicious and sad and romantic it all is
How this Beautiful Story Starts
Where to begin, recapping a book I enjoyed so thoroughly that its perfect, no-ends-left-untied finish felt bittersweet.
If it takes me 15 years to write a book that brings someone else such relaxed pleasure, then it was a 15 years well-spent.
Walter's novel jumps fluidly between the small fishing village of Porto Vergogna in 1962, the present day, and points of interest to the characters in between. This makes a summary somewhat difficult, but here goes.
Pasquale, a handsome college student in 1962, lives with his newly-widowed mother and his crazy, ugly witch of an aunt in their 6-room "hotel": the Adequate View Hotel. No one comes to this fishing village, which is quickly losing its fishermen to larger vessels and faraway factories. Pasquale's dream is to transform the village into a tourist destination, given its location - it's the bastard cousin of the Cinque Terre, and lobbies unsuccessfully to be the sixth town in that beautiful Italian coastal string of villages - why? Well, it's smaller, more remote, and less picturesque.
The hotel gets its name from its only guest, an alcoholic American World War II veteran and unprolific writer named Alvis Bender. Alvis finds the word "beautiful" to be too inflated, and tells Pasquale's father Carlo that it has lost its meaning after the war. To have a real effect, Carlo gives it this name, and like the title of the book, I find it wonderfully satisfying.
Pasquale is a replacement son for parents who lost both their boys in the war, and when we meet him, he is scraping away at a dusting of sand near the water, trying to make it into a beach (failure). He also spends his days moving rocks on a cliff at a task that even Sisyphus would laugh at - Pasquale wants to build a tennis court. On a cliff. Never having seen an actual game of tennis played, and only imagining that the American tourists who will flock to the hotel will never miss, he doesn't realize that every ball will fly off the cliff into the sea.
He's just that kind of romantic.
And who better for him to fall in love with than a beautiful American starlet who arrives (accidentally?) at his doorstep? Dee Moray, with a supporting role in the movie Cleopatra, filming in Rome, has had the misfortune of comforting star Richard Burton, when Burton was on the outs with Elizabeth Taylor. (Glamorous much?) She experiences horrible bouts of pain and vomiting, and is told that she is dying of cancer before she is sent to Porto Vergogna, and then on to Switzerland for treatment.
I Can't Tell You Any More
Really. I can't stand it. What happens to Pasquale and Dee is too interesting to read that I can't bear to spoil it. I've already blathered on too long about just the first couple of chapters. Instead, let's talk format and characters.
Format and Characters
If novels struggle to keep your attention due to conventional format, Beautiful Ruins will feel like a breath of fresh air. The chapters are told not only from the perspectives of different characters, all fascinating and fully formed, but Walters frequently varies the formats. You read:
- the first and only chapter in Alvis Bender's wartime novel of his 20-second love Maria, before her fall
- the final chapter of Alvis, years later and still a romantic, through the eyes of his wife as he asks for another round of drinks
- the rejected chapter of legendary film producer Michael Deane's autobiography about his rise to power on Dee's back, struggling to keep the passion between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton alive in order to make back the money that the studio sunk into Cleopatra
- a movie pitch for Donner!, a far-too-expensive biopic about settlers heading west and into cannibalism
- a play about a drug-addicted, lost, manipulative, and charming comedic musician who looks like someone famous
Then there's Michael Deane himself. We see him, an unflattering portrait of a man at any point in time, and in the present day he is so old but so preserved by plastic surgery that he has a smooth baby face that causes strangers to stare.
And Shane Wheeler, a thirty-something living in his parent's basement, divorced and out of a job and out of his characteristic confidence. He has tattooed "ACT" on his arm as an inspirational reminder to "act as if Ye have faith and it shall be given to you." He finds out years later that this quote he'd lived by wasn't biblical as he'd thought, but was instead pulled from a Paul Newman movie.
And they're all just in supporting roles.
The Beautiful Part
Each of these characters - Michael and Claire in Hollywood and Shane on its cusp; Pasquale in the past and the present; the lovely, enigmatic Dee - they're all, as Dee tells Pasquale, waiting for their lives to start. This idea, that everyone is waiting for their big adventure, climax, and true meaning, feels real beyond the novel and beyond the movies.
Watching them as they wait, and as they live through the most significant moments of their lives, making big decisions and falling in love and traveling and finding themselves and trying to make right the wrongs of the past, is a joy.
Of course, I've left out the big details about Dee, just as the novel circles around her without actually hearing her voice until the gorgeous ending. But as I've said, I refuse to be a spoiler about this book, because I loved it.
So go and enjoy Beautiful Ruins the way you would a long afternoon on Pasquale's non-existent Porto Vergogna beach, never wanting the moment to end but just glad, whatever its flaws, that it existed at all.
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