To situate a novel partly in 1960s Italy with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and partly in 2000s Hollywood is surely a unique approach. This novel goes quite a bit further in both location and time.
Beautiful Ruins opens in the 1960s in a miniscule town on the Italian coast.
Porto Vergogna was a tight cluster of a dozen old whitewashed houses, an abandoned chapel, and the town’s only commercial interest — the tiny hotel and cafe owned by Pasquale’s family — all huddled like a herd of sleeping goats in a crease in the sheer cliffs. Behind the village, the rocks rose six hundred feet to a wall of black, striated mountains. Below it, the sea settled in a rocky, shrimp-curled cove, from which the fishermen put in and out every day. […] The streets, such as they were, consisted of a few narrow pathways between the houses […] so that unless one was standing in the piazza San Pietro, the little town square, it was possible anywhere in the village to reach out and touch walls on either side.
The only regular visitor to this hotel is Alvis Bender, an American writer who appears once a year to hole up and write. In a decade, he has produced only a single chapter.
Pasquale, the young man who owns and runs the hotel with his bedridden mother and cranky old aunt, is a man who dreams that the tiny town and his hotel will one day flourish like the Cinque Terre towns to the north — “A flood of Americans, led by the bravissimo US president John Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline”. So far his dreams have been fruitless, but then, astonishingly, into the town one morning comes an American actress.
Pasquale Tursi watched the arrival of the woman as if in a dream. [..]
“She is with the American company working on the film in Rome.” [says Orenzio, the boatman]. “The whore and husband-thief Elizabeth Taylor is Cleopatra. This is another player in the film.”
Dee Moray, the actress, speaks little Italian, and he speaks no English, and the interaction between Pasquale and the woman are charmingly done. Is she beautiful? Well…. Pasquale and Orenzio discuss her beauty, and conclude that she is no Claudia Cardinale (“perfection”), but has an uncommon face.
Dee is sick, apparently, and has come to the town to rest. “Cancer”, she says. After they hear her retching, they call a doctor, who diagnoses her not with cancer, but pregnancy.
The novel switches between the dreamy chapters set in Porto Vergogna in the 1960s, and Hollywood in the 2000s, a sometimes startling change. The Hollywood chapters are occasionally dreamy and descriptive in a similar style to the Italian chapters:
Before sunrise — before Guatemalan gardeners in dirty dinged lawn trucks, before Caribbeans come to cook, clean and clothe, before Montessori, Pilates and Coffee Bean before Benzes and BMWs nose onto palmed streets […] — there are the sprinklers: rising from the ground to spit-spray the northwest corner of Greater Los Angeles.
But once the characters appear, the tone of the Hollywood chapters is quite different.
Claire wakes jonesing for data.
Claire Silver works for the legendary producer Michael Deane, as the first line of defense against the many terrible scripts and pitches that come their way. Claire is on the edge of leaving her boyfriend and job.
Hollywood, it is clear, is the connection between the two strands of this novel, but for about half the novel, it is not clear exactly what that connection is. The film Cleopatra plays a part: it was complicated to film, involved many changes of directors and location, and bombed at the box office, but the scandalous affair between Burton and Taylor, both married to others at the time, brought immense publicity to the film. Burton’s appearance in the novel is one of the most entertaining parts of the book and a bold choice. He was a famously promiscuous womanizer, so the novel’s descriptions of his dalliances are certainly plausible,
Besides the thoughtful, lovely passages of description (more so in the Italian chapters, which I must admit are my favourite), the characters in this novel are memorable. There is Pat, a washed-up rock musician with a drinking problem who almost reaches fame with his ‘edgy, smart musical comedy’ in Edinburgh.
When [Pat] told New Yorkers he was from Seattle, they’d mutter Nirvana or Pearl Jam, and Pat would grit his teeth and pretend some camaraderie with those ass-smelling latecomer poseur flannel bands. Funny how Portland, Seattle’s goofy little brother, had achieved similar alt-cool.
There is Shane Wheeler, an aspiring scriptwriter who is trying to pitch Donner!, a chortle-inducing screenplay:
which will concern itself not with the classic Donner Party story — all those people stuck at the awful camp, freezing and starving to death and finally eating one another — but with the story of a cabinetmaker in the party who leads a group of people, mostly young women, on a harrowing, heroic journey out of the mountains to safety, and then — attention, third act! –– when he’s regained his strength, returns to rescue his wife and kids!
This is a sprawling book, to be sure: it covers fifty years, two continents, multiple locales and many characters. Some of these are irrelevant to the main plot, such as the novelist Alvis Bender and his WWII history. I read each such digression as akin to short stories, only tenuously linked to the main plot. They did not detract from the main story for me, but an impatient reader, waiting to find out what happens to the main characters, may feel differently.
What keeps the novel from being great literature is its ending. The final scenes are just a little too sweetly convenient, and there is a touch of sentimentality throughout that may turn off some readers. The final chapter is a summary, a sort of literary version of the brief what-happened summaries at the end of a film, that could be considered either charming or mawkish.
That said, this novel is a very pleasing, and distinctly original, read indeed.
From the afterword by Jess Walter:
Once I did an event with another author, and when the audience asked what we were working on I said I”d just abandoned a suburban cattle-ranching novel for a multi-generational, multi-genre, multi-point-of-view book about 1960s Italy, present-day Hollywood, World War II, and the Donner Party. It was quiet for a moment and then the other writer said “I think you should go back to the cattle-ranching book.”
I remember you recommended this book to me some time ago, and I also enjoyed the read. Like you, the Italian chapters were by far and away my favourites.