Beautiful Ruins

Novel by Jess Walters

Some thoughts, in no particular order:

1. I love reading Washington State authors. It makes them seem like normal people (I could have driven by his house!) and pulls me up out of the murky depths of trying to get published and being rejected for the 67th time. Jess Walter did it and he's from Spokane! Maybe I can, too!

2. No one knows what literary or commercial fiction really is. Not me (see the post in which I attempted to pin it down and failed), not publishers, not NPR. Cause this cover looks like commercial fiction, but the book is billed as literary fiction, but it's such an engaging read that it blows most contemporary literary fiction away. See what I mean?

3. I like starting my blog with lists. I like anything with lists, actually. And this book ends with a list! Really! A list of happy endings for various characters, both the expected and the unexpected. I hope that didn't ruin it for you, but it makes me feel better to know that it's all going to turn out okay. Which is very commercial fiction-ish, by the way.

4. I'm using a lot of exclamation points today. Sorry, sorry about that. I'll restrain myself.

Okay, here's the book in a nutshell...nope, can't do it. There is no nutshelling this book. Jess Walter wrote a TRULY sweeping story. It goes from 1960s Italy where the young owner of a small hotel hosts and helps a young American actress working on the set of "Cleopatra," to modern day Hollywood where a producer's assistant and would-be screenwriter are having early life crises, to World War II Italy, to the post-grunge music scene in the UK, to 1970s theater in Seattle, and back again. Sweeping. I was halfway in before I'd met all the main characters. And all these characters and settings blend not in a mixed up strangers sort of way but a completely natural telling of their lives. Walter makes the extraordinary seem ordinary and vice versa. His language is beautifully simple.

In fact, I think that besides the likeable characters, interesting settings, and surprising plot, this is what makes this book so excellent. The simplest scene is beautiful and important in both the smallest and biggest ways. There is a scene where the hotelier and actress go for a walk to see an old WWII pillbox bunker. A German soldier has painted portraits on the inside. It's a momentary distraction for the characters but as a reader you can sort of kind of start to tell the importance of the moment. And then we come back to it again. And again. In small ways all, but that's his style. Small becomes big, like these types of scenes, and yet the huge things (scandal! pregnancy! drugs! again with the exclamation points!) just fall in line and don't seem huge at all until you step back and see them.

Walter is such an excellent writer that I would be inordinately jealous, except that he confesses in the interview at the back that it took him 15 years to write this story. As I told a friend, I wasn't even an adult 15 years ago, so I'm okay with it.

I think my feelings are clear here: read this book. Everyone can love it, despite the literary label. High school students will probably be asked to write papers on it in 15 or 20 years and they'll hate it then, of course. I've also heard that some "real" book clubs are discussing this book, so for those two groups I'll leave you with some literary analysis that you are welcome to steal: one of the unifying elements of the book is how very human we all are in our constant striving for success. At one point a group of the characters are travelling to Seattle on a quest with many different purposes, though each of them is looking for some kind of fulfillment. Walter compares them to the Scarecrow and Tinman, who discovered on THEIR quest that the things they sought, they had all along. As they fly into the Emerald City, Walter uses imagery from "The Wizard of Oz." That's genius.

And it still has a happy ending.