Beautiful Ruins

Jess Walter

The Book of the Year

Before he was a novelist, Jess Walter was a newspaper reporter and coauthor of books on Bernard Kerik, O.J. prosecutor Christopher Darden, and Randy Weaver, the white separatist shot at his home in Ruby Ridge, Idaho. His new novel, which could have been written only by an obsessive observer of men who, like his previous subjects, bow to fate or run screaming away from it, is one of the funniest, most trenchant novels of the year.

Beautiful Ruins (Harper, $26) begins in the early 1960s. A young, virtually unknown American actress gets sent by the studio crisis manager for Cleopatra to a broken-down hotel on the Italian coast after Richard Burton gets her pregnant. The owner of the hotel falls for her, but in the end he leaves her behind, making the choice he's supposed to make (attempting to reunite with the mother of his child) rather than the choice he desires.

Meanwhile, the story flips and backflips through time, place, and form. The hotelier shows up in Hollywood, looking for the actress he abandoned 50 years before. Elsewhere in L.A., the crisis manager, now a plastic-surgery-addicted producer (with "the face of a nine-year-old Filipino girl"), writes a memoir in which he boastfully describes how he had no choice but to exile the actress in order to save Cleopatra. In Sandpoint, Idaho, the actress's now grown son — Burton's bastard — stars in a community-theater production of a play based on his own struggles with fame. The story moves on to Edinburgh, Scotland, and World War II and the Donner Trail, but in unexpected forms: Interspersed with traditional narrative chapters, the book includes a film treatment, the rejected first chapter of the producer's memoir, a lost book manuscript.

The book is a Rubik's Cube of plot and format that Walter miraculously and seamlessly gets in order by the end. And by the end you have two kinds of characters: those who let random acts decide their fate, and those who make their own luck. Beautiful Ruins is a very funny book about a distinctly American relationship to destiny. It's a book about weathering the current of fate. And it's a book that could be written only by a highly attuned spectator of compromised men.