Jess Walter

Jess Walter is an American novelist whose Beautiful Ruins weaves a love story between 1960s Cinque Terre and contemporary Hollywood across sixty years, combining sharp media satire and genuine romanticism into one of the most entertaining American novels of its decade.

Jess Walter worked as a journalist and true crime writer — his account of the Ruby Ridge standoff, Every Knee Shall Bow (1995), was nominated for the Edgar Award — before his fiction career took off. He published four literary crime novels before Beautiful Ruins (2012) reached a much larger audience and established him as a writer whose gifts extend well beyond genre.

Beautiful Ruins moves between 1962 and the present day, between a small village on the Italian Ligurian coast and contemporary Hollywood, through a cast that includes a young Italian innkeeper who falls in love with an American actress, that actress’s Hollywood producer, and a contemporary story development assistant who discovers the connection between them. The novel is simultaneously a Hollywood satire, a historical romance, and a meditation on the gap between what we hope our lives will become and what they actually are.

The Hollywood sections are genuinely funny — Walter’s ear for the language of pitch meetings and development hell is exact — and the Italian sections are genuinely moving. The formal achievement is making these tonal registers coexist. The Zero (2006), his novel about a 9/11 rescue worker’s post-traumatic dissociation, is his most formally experimental novel and was a National Book Award finalist. Walter writes with consistent intelligence and humor, and Beautiful Ruins is the ideal starting point — a novel that is entertaining enough to read quickly and substantial enough to think about afterward.