"Beautiful Ruins" by Jess Walter Parts of Jess Walter's mosaic novel "Beautiful Ruins" take place in a remote Italian coastal town in 1962. Other pieces can be found in present-day Hollywood. Still others are scattered in Edinburgh; Seattle; and Florence, Italy, not to mention Portland, Ore.; Truckee, Calif.; and Sandpoint, Idaho. "Beautiful Ruins" also includes wittily wrought excerpts from its various characters" writings, among them a novel, a memoir, a play and a movie pitch. The screenplay idea is about the Donner party ("Donner!"). It might just be the worst screenplay idea Hollywood has ever known. Since there is no easy way to summarize all this, think of "Beautiful Ruins" in terms of its most powerful figure: Elizabeth Taylor. She does not appear anywhere in the book except in one snapshot. "Bah," says one resident of the tiny Italian village when he sees it. But she is only one or two degrees of separation from most of the vividly etched characters. And the repercussions of her notoriously erratic behavior change the lives of all of them. "Beautiful Ruins" opens with a haunting but picturesque image: a dying American actress arrives by boat to Porto Vergogna, the otherwise inaccessible coastal town. She is tall and blond. She is not Liz Taylor. And she does not explain why she chose this destination, beyond saying that what drew her was its isolation. She thinks a man she knows will be arriving to meet her soon. Porto Vergogna does not have much of a tourist trade. Its only pensione, the Hotel Adequate View, is run by a handsome, unworldly young man named Pasquale Tursi, who labors to cut a tennis court into a rock cliff, even though this makes no sense at all. That pensione has six rooms, three dining tables and two witches, Pasquale's aunt and mother. Its only regular visitor is Alvis Bender, an American writer who would rather drink than write. So the arrival of the actress calling herself Dee Moray is big local news and becomes cause for teasing the instantly smitten Pasquale. "You are a fellator of goats," one local tells Pasquale contemptuously. The woman is a cinema star. But Dee Moray is not really a cinema star. Nor is she dying. And she would not be sequestered in Porto Vergogna (the name means "shame") if Elizabeth Taylor were not in the midst of making "Cleopatra" in Rome - or, rather, not making it. Very publicly she has taken long breaks for illness, rejected her current husband, Eddie Fisher, and bedazzled Richard Burton, who will be her next one. Unlike his wild new paramour, Burton does figure directly in the novel, and even voices an opinion about Porto Vergogna. "I'm sure it's a fine place, but Christ, man, I've left bigger settlements in my rank trousers," he says. Next, with an inexplicable but successful leap 50 years forward, "Beautiful Ruins" introduces Claire Silver, a young woman who still loves movies, even though her boss, a producer named Michael Deane, has done his best to destroy them. Michael would not wield such power had he not figured out, in Rome in 1962, how best to capitalize on the Taylor-Burton affair. Mr. Walter has diabolical fun with Michael Deane's appearance (endless cosmetic procedures "have caused a 72-year-old man to have the face of a 9-year-old Filipino girl"); credits (a reality show called "Hookbook," with contestants who hook up via social media); and philosophy of how to achieve Hollywood longevity. He wrote a memoir so unpublishable that it was rewritten as a self-help book; but the true memoir eventually turns up in "Beautiful Ruins," and it is well worth waiting for. Like most of this book's characters Michael has finer hidden instincts than the ones he has allowed to shape his life. Fridays are the days when Michael will hear - or, rather, make Claire hear - pitches from absolutely anyone: "His doctor's kid, his gardener's kid, his pool boy's kid, his kid's pool boy." On one of these Fridays, Pasquale Tursi turns up in Hollywood. He says he is looking for Dee Moray. This news shocks Michael terribly, although it will be a while before Mr. Walter lets his readers know why. The sheer honesty of Pasquale's five-decades-long devotion could not be less like the ersatz reality peddled by Michael and Claire. Claire is genuinely shaken by it - "as if she can feel 50 years of longing in that one name, 50 years of an ache that lies dormant in her, too, maybe lies dormant in everyone until it's cracked open like this." When the pieces of "Beautiful Ruins" come together, many other dormant, forgotten yearnings will also break free. As with any story that relies on scrambled chronology, it's worth wondering how "Beautiful Ruins" would work as a straightforward narrative. Not as well. Moments of confusion would vanish, but so would the magic. Mr. Walter ("Citizen Vince," "The Zero," "The Financial Lives of the Poets") has always been more intuitive than linear, a believer in capricious destiny with a fine, freewheeling sense of humor. The deeply romantic heart of "Beautiful Ruins" is better expressed by constant circling than it would by any head-on approach. The book takes its title from Louis Menand's New Yorker description of Richard Burton at 54. It takes its essence from Milan Kundera, in a passage about the elusiveness of the present moment. Yet not for nothing is "Cleopatra" the vortex of the novel: the great Hollywood debacle, the love story as train wreck, the project so crazy it made other, crazier projects look sensible by comparison. And yet it was a romance. Mr. Walter has built his book around "Cleopatra" as a monument to crazy love.