Why You'll Love This
A chance encounter on the Italian Riviera in 1962 casts a shadow so long it reaches Hollywood fifty years later — and somehow that feels inevitable.
- Great if you want: literary fiction that leaps across decades and continents
- The experience: lush and meandering — best read when you're in no rush
- The writing: Walter toggles between eras and forms — chapters arrive as screenplays, pitches, memoirs — and it all coheres
- Skip if: you want a tight plot; this is more mood and character than momentum
About This Book
A young Italian innkeeper. A dying American actress. A brief, charged encounter on a sun-drenched cliff above the Ligurian Sea in 1962. These two people shouldn't matter to each other beyond a single summer — and yet their connection reaches across five decades, pulling Hollywood producers, failed screenwriters, aging rock musicians, and a handful of broken dreamers into its orbit. Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins is fundamentally about the stories we tell ourselves to survive disappointment, and the stubborn persistence of hope in people who probably should have given up on it long ago.
What makes this novel so pleasurable to read is Walter's structural audacity — chapters shift between eras, continents, and even formats, including a pitch document, a novel excerpt, and a screenplay fragment, all woven together without ever feeling gimmicky. His prose is warm and quietly funny, capable of moving from genuine pathos to sharp satire within a single scene. The result is a book that keeps surprising you, not with plot twists, but with the unexpected depth it finds in characters who first appear to be types. Walter earns every emotional moment because he never reaches for one cheaply.
