The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 25 November 2013
by Jess Walter
This novel opens, romantically enough, in the Cinque Terre region of Italy, land of sharp cliffs and ridiculously picturesque fishing villages, all pastel colors and azure waters. A young American actress washes ashore in the village of Porto Vergogne, an unknown backwater for tourists, and puts up in the tiny pensione called Hotel Adequate View. Pasquale, the owner, is smitten by her beauty, and starstruck by her association with the big movie production then going on in Rome. It is 1962, and the movie is Liz Taylor and Richard Burton in the epic Cleopatra. But, Dee Moray, the actress, has been deceived, led astray by the forces of Hollywood's manipulation. She is lost and alone. Pasquale offers her some grounding in reality. We might think this turns into a sprawling romantic story, but it doesn't quite go that way. Jumping back and forth in time, Walter's tale is of the distorted paths our lives travel, never the complete arc of a movie, no matter how much we wish to believe that. In the present day, an aged Pasquale has come all the way to Hollywood to find Dee Moray, by way of one of the lowly assistants on Cleopatra, Michael Deane, who is now past his own prime as a big-time Hollywood producer. Along the way, we take up the story of a young man pitching an unlikely movie idea based on the story of the Donner Party, a washed up almost-famous musician, a young woman production assistant looking for a reason to get out of the business, and even a glimpse of Richard Burton in a drunken drive across the Italian countryside. Walter's book spreads across time, but there is an intimate, personal quality to the tale. Everyone is looking at their lives and trying to make sense of the illogical turns life has taken. Everyone is looking to understand the point of their own story. But it isn't so simple. We want what we want, Deane says, and that seems sufficient to explain the puzzling decisions we seem to make against our own best interests. But what it all comes down to is what Time does to us. It distorts our own images of ourselves and of what we expected from life. The real story ends up being about how we respond to Time's distortions, how we choose to live with the dents and dings, the ruins that Time makes of us. While the book is slightly uneven, with its tone gently shifting between romance, pointed observation, and winsome reflection, it is yet a bright and intelligent look at what all good books are really about, time and how we live in it.