Book Review by Heidi Simmons
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Beautiful Ruins
Jess Walters
Fiction
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A romantic novel, Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins (Harper, 352 pages) spans five decades, incorporates exotic locations and has multiple characters that tell a story about love and ambition.
Beautiful Ruins begins in 1962 on the little (fictional) Italian island called Porto Vergogna, translated Port of Shame, that once served as a brothel. It’s where young Pasquale tries to make his family’s hotel into a classy resort and meets beautiful American actress Dee Moray. She escapes to the remote hotel after playing her role in the Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton film Cleopatra that is still in production on the mainland.
Even with the language and cultural challenges, Pasquale and Moray become friends. When Pasquale intervenes to help his sweet actress with an “illness,” he gets embroiled in a Hollywood drama of his own in which Richard Burton plays a pivotal part. This is the heart of the novel.
Walter’s narrative jumps fifty years to a Hollywood studio lot where Pasquale, as an old man, is in search of Moray. But first he must find Michael Deane, who in 1962 also impacted their young lives. Many characters are added to the narrative but they all gently come together as their lives intersect, entwine and overlap.
The many small stories develop into the greater narrative. This creative approach requires some patience if your preference is to follow a single linear narrative. It may take a little investment, but before long you are hooked. Walter beautifully captures place and people. He is brilliant at the small details that reveal the subtle nature of his characters’ dilemmas.
Beautiful Ruin is Walter’s sixth novel. He is a National Book Award finalist and Edgar Award winning author. His background is in journalism. He wrote a comprehensive nonfiction account of the Idaho incident at Ruby Ridge.
As a writer he is both intensely serious and pointedly humorous.
A recent guest at the UCR Palm Desert Arts and Letters Series, Walter had a lot to say about Beautiful Ruins and writing. For 15 years, he had been working on the idea and writing various drafts of the book.
During his research, Walter read a New Yorker article in which Richard Burton was described after appearing on the Dick Caveat Show as a beautiful ruin. It was if the clouds opened up for the author. “My whole focus about these people and the place they arrive at in their lives, is they haven’t become the successes they wanted. They haven’t fulfilled their promise and yet they have a kind of rare beauty that they’ve all achieved through life and loss,” explained Walter.
In his fiction, Walter incorporates historical events into the narrative. He talked about the pivotal cultural touchstones he uses in his books. “Those moments attract me. I look for the defining moments of a character. It is the moment before something is going to change that interests me,” Walter said.
“As a writer, I always felt outside the culture. It’s taken me a lot of years to realize that’s an incredibly valuable place for a writer to be. Culture is a fast moving river and if you’re in it, you can’t describe it. As a writer, you have to be off to the side watching it go by. You have to have depth of focus as a writer,” shared Walter.
Beautiful Ruins is currently in development to be made into a movie. Walter is writing the screenplay. Todd Fields is attached to direct. But Walter does not have a lot of faith in the Hollywood system. This is his fourth novel to be optioned by Hollywood. Walter’s challenge is to protect the integrity of his story if and when it becomes a movie.
There are beautiful and poetic moments in Walter’s prose. It is a story about story telling. And Walter shows us how each and every life contributes to a grander narrative.
