Hollywood's bit part in epic
By Helen Schulman |
July 8, 2012, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
IT is April 1962. A beautiful blond American actress, a dying beautiful blond American actress, mysteriously arrives alone and by boat to the dock of "a rumor of a town," the fictitious Porto Vergogna on the Italian coast south of Genoa. She is 22-year-old Dee Moray, fresh off the Roman film set of "Cleopatra" - the scandal-ridden Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton epic, which, with a budget at about 300 million of today's dollars, is among the most expensive movies ever made.
This young woman's charmed entrance into this tiny village, which is accessible only by water, captures the attention of Pasquale Tursi, the azure-eyed, even younger proprietor of an empty "pensione," the "Hotel Adequate View." "Chest-deep in daydreams" and also seawater, Pasquale, who aspires to turn the village into a resort town, has taken on the Sisyphean task of trying to build a beach out of "the rocky, shrimp-curled cove" by getting wet and digging the stones out of the inlet by hand. He holds a big rock beneath his chin and watches in "a burst of clarity after a lifetime of sleep" as Dee ascends onto the pier. She smiles at him and Pasquale falls in love, and "would remain in love for the rest of his life - not so much with the woman, whom he didn't even know, but with the moment."
Are you hooked yet? If you are, you're going to love this book. It opens like a movie; you can almost hear the swelling soundtrack, promising a good old-fashioned, escapist story, even as it is imbued with a knowing - and often hilarious - satirical edge. And it ends like a movie, too, with a helping of tied-up satisfaction, leaving at least this reader with a song in her heart and a yen for Chinese food. But if you're not hooked, I bet you'll like "Beautiful Ruins" even more - because the surprising and witty novel of social criticism that flows from its lush, romantic opening offers so much more than just entertainment in terms of scope - the second chapter jumps ahead 50 years to present-day Hollywood - emotional range and formalist invention.
"Beautiful Ruins" is Walter's sixth novel. He is a bold and funny writer who successfully surfed the zeitgeist in his visceral 9/11 novel, "The Zero" (2006), a finalist for a National Book Award; and in his last book, "The Financial Lives of the Poets" (2009), where he gave us his take on the financial crises. Also a career journalist (he's written for Newsweek and The Washington Post and published a nonfiction book about the Ruby Ridge siege in Idaho), Walter is simply great on how we live now, and - in this book - on how we lived then and now, here and there.
"Beautiful Ruins" is his Hollywood novel, his Italian novel and his Pacific Northwestern novel all braided into one: an epic romance, tragicomic, invented and reported, magical yet hard-boiled (think Garcia Marquez meets Peter Biskind), with chapters that encompass not just Italy in the 1960s and present-day Hollywood, but also Seattle and Britain and Idaho, plot strands unfolding across the land mines of the last half-century - an American landscape of vice, addiction, loss and heartache, thwarted careers and broken dreams. It is also a novel about love: amorous love, filial love, parental love and the sustaining love of friendship.
His balanced pathos and comedy stirs the heart and amuses as it also rescues us from the all-too-human pain that is the motor of this complex novel. Any reservations the reader might have about another book about Hollywood will probably be swept aside by this high-wire feat of bravura storytelling.
This young woman's charmed entrance into this tiny village, which is accessible only by water, captures the attention of Pasquale Tursi, the azure-eyed, even younger proprietor of an empty "pensione," the "Hotel Adequate View." "Chest-deep in daydreams" and also seawater, Pasquale, who aspires to turn the village into a resort town, has taken on the Sisyphean task of trying to build a beach out of "the rocky, shrimp-curled cove" by getting wet and digging the stones out of the inlet by hand. He holds a big rock beneath his chin and watches in "a burst of clarity after a lifetime of sleep" as Dee ascends onto the pier. She smiles at him and Pasquale falls in love, and "would remain in love for the rest of his life - not so much with the woman, whom he didn't even know, but with the moment."
Are you hooked yet? If you are, you're going to love this book. It opens like a movie; you can almost hear the swelling soundtrack, promising a good old-fashioned, escapist story, even as it is imbued with a knowing - and often hilarious - satirical edge. And it ends like a movie, too, with a helping of tied-up satisfaction, leaving at least this reader with a song in her heart and a yen for Chinese food. But if you're not hooked, I bet you'll like "Beautiful Ruins" even more - because the surprising and witty novel of social criticism that flows from its lush, romantic opening offers so much more than just entertainment in terms of scope - the second chapter jumps ahead 50 years to present-day Hollywood - emotional range and formalist invention.
"Beautiful Ruins" is Walter's sixth novel. He is a bold and funny writer who successfully surfed the zeitgeist in his visceral 9/11 novel, "The Zero" (2006), a finalist for a National Book Award; and in his last book, "The Financial Lives of the Poets" (2009), where he gave us his take on the financial crises. Also a career journalist (he's written for Newsweek and The Washington Post and published a nonfiction book about the Ruby Ridge siege in Idaho), Walter is simply great on how we live now, and - in this book - on how we lived then and now, here and there.
"Beautiful Ruins" is his Hollywood novel, his Italian novel and his Pacific Northwestern novel all braided into one: an epic romance, tragicomic, invented and reported, magical yet hard-boiled (think Garcia Marquez meets Peter Biskind), with chapters that encompass not just Italy in the 1960s and present-day Hollywood, but also Seattle and Britain and Idaho, plot strands unfolding across the land mines of the last half-century - an American landscape of vice, addiction, loss and heartache, thwarted careers and broken dreams. It is also a novel about love: amorous love, filial love, parental love and the sustaining love of friendship.
His balanced pathos and comedy stirs the heart and amuses as it also rescues us from the all-too-human pain that is the motor of this complex novel. Any reservations the reader might have about another book about Hollywood will probably be swept aside by this high-wire feat of bravura storytelling.
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