nomadreader

The backstory: Two years ago I read and enjoyed The Financial Lives of Poets  by Jess Walter ( my review. ) When I was at the American Library Association's Midwinter conference in January, the fantastic ladies of Harper Collins' library marketing department alerted me to this new novel, which is dramatically different from The Financial Lives of Poets. The basics: Spanning from Italy in the 1960's to present day Los Angeles , the story in Beautiful Ruins  begins on the film set of Cleopatra  in Rome. Young American actress Dee Moray arrives at the isolated Italian city of Portovergogna and at The Hotel Adequate View, a small inn run by Pasquale, a young Italian man whose father has just died. Fast forward fifty years to Los Angeles and Claire is a production assistant for Michael Deane, an aging Hollywood producer. My thoughts: It would be too simple to say this novel gets better the farther you get in it, but that is partially true. As it did in The Financial Live...

The basics: The Financial Lives of Poets is the story of Matthew Prior, a newspaper reporter who quit his job to start a financial website written in poetry. Seriously. Not surprisingly, this venture has failed, and Matthew now finds his marriage less happy than it once was, his father (in the early stages of dementia) living with them, his sons wishing for electronics, their house on the verge of foreclosure, and himself increasingly desperate. My thoughts: This novel took me on a roller coaster of a reading experience. I absolutely adored the first few chapters. I was reading it in public and could not stop myself from laughing out loud. The narrative began smart, funny and fresh, as when he describes the uniforms his sons wear to Catholic school: I think these uniforms wouldn't be so bad if they didn't make the kids all look like bank tellers on casual Friday or the employees of a discount airline or--like me... Throughout the book, the hilarious observations share...