Jess Walter’s ‘Beautiful Ruins’ mixes Hollywood romance and Hollywood satire

{ APRIL 19 7:30 p.m. Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. Free. Details: www.bookshopsantacruz.com. }

By WALLACE BAINE

Jess Walter’s novel “Beautiful Ruins” was one of the most well-received fiction titles of 2012, collecting hosannas from all corners of the media as well as readers. Now that it’s been released in paperback, it has shot up to the top of the fiction-paperback bestseller list as well.

Much of the novel’s success can be attributed to Walter’s genius at making it a versatile and adaptable read for readers who don’t want to be confined to genres – it’s both a shabby-chic romance set in Italy in the 1960s, and a smart satire aimed at the Hollywood business model of the 2010s. It contains both mysterious fictional characters like the enigmatic actress Dee Moray and real-life figures come to life on the page, like the great actor and celebrated womanizer Richard Burton. It’s a classically told yarn, mixed with a memoir, a play, even a movie pitch.

Walter comes to Bookshop Santa Cruz on Friday to mark the paperback release of “Ruins.” He arrives with a movie deal for the book in his pocket, with the respected director Todd Field (“Little Children”) already attached to the project. But, he said, it could have been awkward selling a story that skewered Hollywood as “Ruins” does.

“I’m only slightly afraid that I’ll burst into flames, trying to write a Hollywood satire and then trying to adapt it into a film,” he said.

“Beautiful Ruins” begins in a cinematic fashion along the rocky coast of a tiny Italian village called Porto Vergogna where the ambitious owner of the local hotel named Pasquale watches as a boat arrives in port carrying a beautiful blonde stranger to stay at his cliffside hotel, the Hotel Adequate View. It’s a memorable opening for a wild ride of a book that flashes back and forth from the “La Dolce Vita” landscapes of Italy in the ’60s to the present day, alighting on everything from the Hollywood epic “Cleopatra” to modern-day porn addiction.

Walter, 47, is a veteran novelist who has folded Hollywood themes in many of his previous works (“The Financial Lives of the Poets,” “The Zero”). The best satire, he said, comes from the inside.

“Satire works best if you’re satirizing something you have affection for or belief in. Catholics write the best satire of Catholicism. The reason that ‘The Book of Mormon’ is so good is that the writers have Mormon backgrounds. My problem with Hollywood isn’t that it’s bad. It’s that it’s half-good. It could be so much better.”

“Beautiful Ruins” – the title could describe the book’s Italian setting on the rugged Cinque Terre coastline, but is, in fact, drawn from a New Yorker profile describing Burton in the early ’60s – took Walter about 15 years to finish.

“It’s not like having a baby where you can point to the time of conception,” he said. “I first started writing about Pasquale and Dee and the Hotel Adequate View in 1997. In that time since, I wrote five other novels, so it wasn’t like I was just slaving away on this one. But I would write myself into a corner, or lose the inspiration or characters, and jump into something else. And when I would return, I would find myself pretty much re-writing the whole thing.”

In those 15 years, he experienced a lot of life, traveling in Europe, living through his mother’s illness and subsequent death and his children growing up. There is even an American writer in the book struggling with writer’s block. The life he lived, he said, ended up being reflected in his writing and giving dimension to the novel.

“The book is a bit of a travelogue of where I went during those 15 years, when I was wandering through London in a kind of writerly fog, thinking that I’d never done anything beautiful and that all my work had been kind of a pose.”

Walter has lived his whole life in Spokane, Wash. He said that he had always intended to leave Spokane, but never did, and even that experience was reflected in his characters.

“I lived in my hometown my whole life, and so Pasquale’s fear that the world is passing him over because he lives in this provincial place is something I can identify with. The thematic meat of the book is this idea of regret and the power of certain moments in your life. And that’s Pasquale’s dilemma, thinking of the life he lived, and the life he didn’t live.”