Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

When one of my best friends heard I was traveling to Italy - more specifically, to the Cinque Terre, she enthusiastically recommended Beautiful Ruins, a book that takes place in a sixth, more isolated, village Walters imagines for his story.

Beautiful Ruins opens with a beautiful film actress arriving in Porto Vergogna, Italy in 1962.  She was in the film production of Cleopatra but now she's sick and being sent away to await her lover in this obscure coastal village.  There, blue-eyed Pasquale Tursi is carrying on his father's legacy, imagining his forgotten village and his dead father's hotel will someday attain the tourism fame of the Cinque Terre. 

As Dee Moray settles in at Pasquale's hotel, the oddly named Hotel  Adequate View (yes, there's a story there), I was convinced I would love this book.  Walters paints a beautiful picture of a quiet village still dominated by fishermen and memories of the war.  Pasquale's earnest attempts to cater to his beautiful American visitor and the tenuous friendship the two form are enchanting.  The village and the story has a nice bit of quirk that complements the sweetness of Dee and Pasquale's fumbling relationship, such as it is.

Then along comes Richard Burton and the fictional Michael Deane, erstwhile film producer and all-around self-involved douchebag, accompanied by a jump in time to modern day California and the whole thing came off the rails for me.  Walters departs from his promising beginning to introduce us to Deane and a pack of less than lovable losers including Deane's development assistant, Claire, who came to work looking for the next big film and ended up working on some garbage reality show called Hookbook.  There's Shane, who has a tattoo of a made-up Bible passage that he spent his whole life living by until it failed him catastrophically, until he heads to Hollywood to pitch his terrible movie idea to Michael Deane.  Finally there's Pat Bender, washed-up frontman of a band everybody forgot, a screw-up who lost the good things in his life to drugs and bad decisions.
This is all to say that I loved the flashbacks to 1962 Italy and ensuing hijinks, but grinding through the present day with Walter's over-quirked, generally unpleasant West Coast set who are alternately trying to get ahead and right past wrongs left me cold.  All that said, Walter does manage to bring things full circle in a way that tugged gently at the heartstrings as one character starts to redeem himself and in so doing sets a lot of wrongs right. 

Walter is undoubtedly an excellent writer.  Beautiful Ruins is packed with perfect description that captures Italy's incredible coast and quaint villages.  The dialogue is fast-moving and realistic.  Even the structure of the story itself is admirable, peeling itself off in layers to reveal what Dee and Pasquale and Richard Burton, and even the unlikeable Michael Deane started in 1962.  Walter's biggest problem is his characters.  At times their exaggerated qualities chip away at their humanity and leave caricatures in their places, which makes Beautiful Ruins a little hollow on the inside.

"...but true quests aren't measured in time or distance anyway, so much as in hope.  There are only two good outcomes for a quest like this, the hope of the serendipitous savant - sail for Asia and stumble on America - and the hope of scarecrows and tin men: that you find out you had the thing you sought all along."

The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter

Happy New Year, everybody! Guess it's time I got to work on closing out the reviews of last year's reads, huh? Here goes...


Obviously, she knows I'm out of work and that we're in debt (she helped us get there) but she doesn't know, for example, that today Richard is cashing out what's left of my retirement so I can make a deferred balloon payment to the mortgage company next week, "After the meeting with Richard," I tell her, "I'll go see the employment counselor. Then I've scheduled a bank robbery. Then I'm selling my organs to buy food. It's a glorious day in Matt-topia."

Lisa has learned to ignore self-pity disguised as humor - my metier.

Matt Prior's life as he knew it is circling the drain the night he heads out to the 7-Eleven for some overpriced milk. He lost his job some months ago, the job he was forced to crawl back to after he risked it all on a website venture dedicated to financial advice written in mediocre poetry. It's starting to seem inevitable that he will lose his house if he doesn't come up with a significant sum of money before week's end. His wife is carrying on an affair of sorts with an old boyfriend via Facebook and text messages, and his dad's mental health is declining rapidly. When Matt, shuffling under the fluorescent lights of the 7-Eleven in his bedroom slippers, happens upon two of the sorts of guys that you'd rather not run into in a 7-Eleven he soon finds himself driving the two stoners to a party and smoking way better weed than he ever smoked in college. With a clarity that only weed can produce, Matt knows that this weed is the weed that can solve all his problems. He just needs to sell it.

The Financial Lives of the Poets drew an inevitable comparison to the TV show Weeds for me. Both are at once laugh out loud funny and sad in their biting satirization of what the American dream has become. Mercilessly does Jess Walter spear the new American family unit that builds its ambitious life on hard work and mountains of debt. He harpoons the people who seemingly without a second thought take out loans on houses and cars they never had any hope of affording sold to them by slick salesmen peddling an unrealistic way of life. Walter mocks the people who, once they've attained some semblance of security, throw it away on goofy dreams and online shopping binges all the while ignoring the important things in life like their spouses, their children, and their friends.

Hidden within Walter's laugh out loud satire, however, is a set of real, recognizable characters that draw readers' sympathies. There's Matt who got lost while he was trying to find his dreams, who can't sleep at night for worrying about what fate will befall his family now that he's failed as their provider. There's his wife, Lisa, who desperately misses the powerful, sexy career woman she used to be before she gave it up for kids. There's Matt's father who is slowly going senile, but still thinks he's "got it" because he can't remember that a stripper named Charity took him for all he was worth. There are countless would-be customers of Matt's pot dealing scheme who feel like they need to have a smoke just to make it through a day at the office. These are people we know, and in some cases these are people we are, and despite all his squeezing them into ridiculous situations for laughs, Walter doesn't let us forget that. The Financial Lives of the Poets is an engaging story of a family gone awry full of cannily delivered truths and a potent satire of life in today's USA.

It was Franklin's favorite game a couple of years ago, Jenga. ... I stare at the beams in my front yard, stacked crosswise, and it comes to me that life is a version of that children's game: pull one from the bottom, and stack it on top and try to keep the whole thing from falling. Slide a board out, stack it on top, the structure growing taller as the weight shifts upward, until the base begins to look like lattice, and pretty soon you realize you're holding your breath, that there are no more safe moves, but still you must try, always try, because that's the game...so you look for a board to slide, gently...slide...gently...even though you can never win, and it's always the same...breathless and tentative...the world teetering above your head.

(My copy provided for review by Erica at Harper Perennial. Thanks!)