Fascinating wreckage

Charm is often a suspect quality in fiction, a trick to cover up the hollowness of the work or distract the reader from its triteness. Beautiful Ruins, a novel by Jess Walter, is so unrelentingly charming that I had to keep my guard up lest it make off with my wallet.

 The opening is terrific: in a tiny village on the coast of Italy in 1962, a young man looks up from his daydreams to see a beautiful woman coming towards him on a boat. She’s a bit player from the famously chaotic set of the movie Cleopatra, and she tells him she is dying. We think we know what’s going to happen, but the author skillfully steers us away from our own expectations.

 Of course it’s a love story, but as this shamelessly romantic novel points out, every story is a love story. And the primary love story in Beautiful Ruins is between the reader and Cinema.

 After that cinematic beginning, Walter shoots us 50 years into the future, to present-day Hollywood where the assistant to a famous producer is dealing with professional disillusionment, relationship problems, and movie pitches that all involve zombies and vampires. Into her office walks an old Italian gentleman — the same Italian on that rocky shore in 1962. He has come to America to find the beautiful woman he met half a century ago, and his only link to her is the Hollywood producer.

 This is a novel where people enter each other’s lives in the most dramatic fashion. They’re movie people after all: they know how to make an entrance. There’s the terrifyingly well-preserved male movie producer; the would-be author composing a novel about his World War II experience; a singer-songwriter stranded at the fringe festival in Edinburgh; and the actor Richard Burton, larger than life and very, very drunk. It’s impossible to read this book without casting the movie in your head.

 Walter loves all his characters, especially the screw-ups, especially the ones who invite derision. Consider the aging hipster trying to remake himself yet again as a screenwriter. “His was an outlook fed by years of episodic TV, by encouraging teachers and counselors, by science-fair ribbons, participant medals, and soccer and basketball trophies — and, most of all, by two attentive and dutiful parents, who raised their five perfect children with the belief — hell, the birthright — that as long as they had faith in themselves, they could be anything they wanted to be.”

 Then there’s the movie producer engaged in a death match with Time. “The first impression one gets of Michael Deane is of a man constructed of wax, or perhaps prematurely embalmed. After all these years, it may be impossible to trace the sequence of facials, spa treatments, mud baths, cosmetic procedures, lifts and staples, collagen implants, outpatient touch-ups, tannings, Botox injections, cyst and growth removals, and stem-cell injections that have caused a seventy-two- year-old man to have the face of a nine-year-old Filipino girl.”

 You read that astute diagnosis of the sense of entitlement and you want its subject to fall flat on his face. You read the inventory of vanity and you expect the producer’s face to fall off. The author does not grant us those cheap satisfactions. He gives us something better: the revelation that humans are not beautiful in spite of their damage, they are beautiful because of it. Compassion — there’s a quality that’s gone missing from popular culture, where casual cruelty is the dominant mode of expression. 

 Beautiful Ruins is set in the zone where dreams intersect with the movies, and Walter shrewdly explains what movies do. Here’s the producer describing his peculiar talent. “’I see what people want. I have a kind of X-ray vision for desire. Ask some guy what he wants to watch on TV and he’ll say news. Opera. Foreign films. But put a box in his house and what’s he watch? Blow jobs and car crashes. Does that mean the country is full of lying degenerates? No. They want to want news and opera. But it’s not what they want.’”

 We want what we want. There’s the truth of the human condition that Hollywood has cashed in on for over a century.

 Beautiful Ruins is such an inventive, ridiculously entertaining read that one can excuse the final chapter with its over-explanation, talk-show ready epiphanies and tying up of loose ends. Why would a novel that celebrates the messiness of life suddenly aspire to neatness? Humans — go figure what they want.