Reviews
Entrancing…Walter's turns of phrase are as brilliant as his plot twists, making for a compelling, fun read., This is a blockbuster, with romance, majesty, comedy, smarts, and a cast of thousands. There's lights, there's camera, there's action. If you want anything more from a novel than Jess Walter gives you in Beautiful Ruins, you're getting thrown out of the theater., 'A monument to crazy love . . . Walter [is] a believer in capricious destiny with a fine, freewheeling sense of humor.' (New York Times), This is a blockbuster, with romance, majesty, comedy, smarts, and a cast of thousands. There's lights, there's camera, there's action. If you want anything more from a novel than Jess Walter gives you in Beautiful Ruins , you're getting thrown out of the theater., [N]othing less than brilliant, a tour de force that crosses decades, continents, and genres, to powerful and often hilarious effect....A masterful novel of love, loss, and hard-won hope that satisfies on every level., His masterpiece . . . an interlocking, continent-hopping, decade-spanning novel with heart and pathos to burn, all big dreams, lost loves, deep longings and damn near perfect., ' Beautiful Ruins is satisfying and delicate, a spectacular story of love, frustration, selfish intent, and the patience of the human heart.' ( The Stranger ), A novel shot in sparkly Technicolor. . . . reimagines history in a package so appealing we'd be idiots not to buy it., A monument to crazy love . . . Walter [is] a believer in capricious destiny with a fine, freewheeling sense of humor., His [Walter's] characters are long-suffering, prone to failure and sometimes at death's door. But the verve and enthusiasm of this novel, from its let's-go-everywhere structure to the comedy in the marrow of its sentences, are wholly life-affirming., Beautiful Ruins is satisfying and delicate, a spectacular story of love, frustration, selfish intent, and the patience of the human heart., Lyrical, heartbreaking, and funny . . . Walter closes the deal with such command that you begin to wonder why up till now he's not often been mentioned as one of the best novelists around. Beautiful Ruins might just correct that oversight., Within a page-turner of a plot, these triumphantly vulnerable characters leap off the page to take up permanent residence in your inner life. The effect is so powerful that to be untouched by Beautiful Ruins might well be like having no inner life at all., Beautiful Runs is itself a showcase for Walter's outrageous literary gifts in virtually every genre and style. . .No wonder critics have been outdoing each other with superlatives. . ., [A] high-wire feat of bravura storytelling. . . . [Walter's] mixture of pathos and comedy stirs the heart and amuses as it also rescues us from the all too human pain that is the motor of this complex and ever-evolving novel., A brilliant, madcap meditation on fate. . . . Walter's prose is a joy-funny, brash, witty and rich with ironic twists. He's taken all of the tricks of the postmodern novel and scoured out the cynicism, making for a novel that's life-affirming but never saccharine., Walter is a very, very funny writer and can do Hollywood satire with the best of them. But this is also a novel with a live, beating heart, full of sympathy for its characters and agut wisdom…You'll want to explore these Ruins., Entrancing novel…Walter's turns of phrase are as brilliant as his plot twists, making for a compelling, fun read., 'A novel with pathos, piercing wit and, most important, the generous soul of a literary classic. . . . Walter has planted himself firmly in the first rank of American authors.' ( Boston Globe ), '[A] high-wire feat of bravura storytelling. . . . [Walter's] mixture of pathos and comedy stirs the heart and amuses as it also rescues us from the all too human pain that is the motor of this complex and ever-evolving novel.' (New York Times Book Review), Walter vividly draws a world both tender and cutthroat, where ambition battles reality, daydreams fight doldrums and sometimes win., 'A monument to crazy love . . . Walter [is] a believer in capricious destiny with a fine, freewheeling sense of humor.' ( New York Times ), A novel with pathos, piercing wit and, most important, the generous soul of a literary classic. . . . Walter has planted himself firmly in the first rank of American authors., [An] enchanting novel. . . Sweeping effortlessly back and forth between Italy and current-day Hollywood, and between various modes of storytelling, Walters builds a world that won't soon let you go.
