By Jess Walter (337 pages)
Published by Harper
Bookish rating: 4.25
This was my first Jess Walter novel, and I was impressed. It begins in a cliffed coastal village in Italy in 1962, as an American actress gets out of a boat to stay at the Hotel Adequate View. We then meet oodles of characters, all of whom have some emotional demons to flesh out.
In the meantime, we go from Italian villages to Rome to Scotland to Seattle to (no, really) Sandpoint, Idaho, to L.A. and Hollywood--but always returning to Italy. Walter coves a lot of ground.
Walter brilliantly switches voices as he moves around various points of view. Sometimes we're getting a story via flashback or a general narrative, but we also learn about characters and story through movie pitches, rejected memoir chapters, plays, and so on. The novel has a tremendous amount of energy, it's incredibly imaginative, the writing is pitch-perfect and delightfully ironic, and the characters are achingly realistic and complex.
Absolutely recommended, and I'm excited to see what Walter accomplished in other novels. Which means I have to read them. Doh! Why does my to-read list never, EVER get shorter?
No comments:
Post a Comment