As he wrote, “During fourteen of those fifteen years the novel existed in my mind as my favorite failure, a hot mess of half-finished sentences and half-formed characters and incomplete stories that I somehow loved beyond all reason since I was pretty certain that, as a book, it would never amount to anything.” He also described it as “a multigenerational, multi-genre, multi-point-of-view book about 1960s Italy, present-day Hollywood, World War II, and the Donner Party.” Many times he thought he would abandon it altogether, even though he was never quite able to. section “In the Time of Galley Slaves.” And learned, to my astonishment, that it took him 15 years to write Beautiful Ruins. Forget the fact that Jess Walter ends Beautiful Ruins perfectly-all those characters and plotlines, all those balls in the air, brought so beautifully and spectacularly to a close in Chapter 21, also titled “Beautiful Ruins.”īut I had to keep going, so I read Walter’s excellent and hilarious essay in the P.S. I could barely put it down, and then I insisted that everyone else read it, too. I finally read Beautiful Ruins in trade paperback, and I was blown away. We all love bestsellers, but sometimes the data gets in the way of the piece at its center, the book. Spotlight on a Bestseller: Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins by Lelia Mander
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