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After hitting a
bump or two in the road, it's time for another installment in the Book Rat
Project, the sustained experiment in which a book critic (Eugenia Williamson)
attempts to act as a human algorithm for a willing subject (your humble
neighborhood book rat, Will Delman).
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After Eugenia
handed me Chris Adrian's The
Great Night (an unqualified success if ever there was one), she
attempted to follow it with Jess
Walter's new novel Beautiful Ruins (perhaps hoping to take advantage
of my recent trip to Italy?).
So how did she do? Here's my review:
Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walter, is a
Hollywood novel with a Hollywood feel. The
story begins in 1962 with the arrival of Dee Moray at a beautiful and rundown pensione
on a minor island off the Italian coast. The beautiful actress, ostensibly
suffering from stomach cancer, on leave from her role in the disaster that was Cleopatra,
alights from a small boat and immediately changes the life of the young
proprietor, Pasquale Tursi, returned from Florence
to care for his dying mother.
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Fast forward to 2012: Clair
Silver, chief development assistant for the Hollywood producer and relic
Michael Deane, wakes up in the LA dawn and makes a deal with Fate: bring me a
pitch that makes me believe in moves again or I’ll burn my life to the ground,
today. That afternoon she’s confronted by a would-be screenwriter obsessed with
physical hunger and an elderly Italian gentleman, sporting the most ancient
Michael Dean business card she’s ever seen, desperate to reconcile with the
lost love of his life.
If Beautiful Ruins
sounds interesting and enjoyable, well, it is. But I’ve come to terms with the
fact that I have an odd taste when it comes to judging fiction, and thus I
found my enjoyment almost constantly tempered. I never fell in love with the abundance
of coincidence this narrative seems to rely on. Not to give anything away, but
by the time I reached the end of Beautiful Ruins I felt like I’d read a
very well constructed Rube Goldburg machine. I was also a bit put off by its
string-along structure—this is a book that favors cliffhangers over resolutions
until the very end—I like a little more variety in my narratives.
But on to what worked for
me: everything else.
The sentences are strong,
varied, entertaining, and fluid. The themes are solid and greater than the
characters. Each setting and occasion was treated with extraordinary care. It
was possible to imagine myself in every room at every stage. Perhaps most impressive,
all of these characters own a voice that they alone seem to control.
Unfortunately, reading
about this cast of flawed and messy people, I never felt as though I couldn’t
guess how the story would end.
By the time I had finished Beautiful
Ruins I felt like I’d just watched a season of Californication,
satisfied but saddened by how much pleasure we can take in watching each other
struggle.
The Book Rat Letter Grade:
A-
So there you have it; while
Eugenia didn't knock this one out of the park she came admirably close. In
response to the few criticisms I was able to muster she assigned me Alix
Ohlin's Signs and Wonders. How'd she do? Tune in next week to find
out!
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