Beautiful ruins has a quality of spectacle, the epic journey of people who enthrall us with personalities that are bigger than real ity. But because Spokane based author Jess Walter knows his way around a novel the zero and most notably, the financial lives of the poets, his extravaganza teeters atop a bedrock of hard reality, speaking uncomfortable truths about the frail, often narcissistic nature of identity. What pulls us back into the book's core is the characters' earnest search for real happiness, an intrepid desire to embrace "the sweet lovely , mess that is life".