Catch hell from Richard Burton ... : The fine conclusion to Beautiful Ruins

There are so many things that could have gone wrong in Jess Walters's novel Beautiful Ruins that it's actually amazing that she brings off this incredibly complicated plot with such grace and dexterity. For example, a novel in which it turns out that one of the main characters, completely unbeknownst to him, is the out-of-wedlock son of Richard Burton, replete with scenes of a drunken Burton careening around in a sports car in Italy during filming of Cleopatra? Should be a ridiculous and exploitative scene, but Walters makes Burton work as a minor character and brings off this strange plot twist without making this a stunt or celebrity novel. Late in the novel some of the main characters visit a regional theater which is staging a play about the fall and redemption of an addicted, narcissistic musician-comedian (Burton's son, in fact), and as Walters present the first scene I'm thinking, uh oh, this will never work, a play within a novel - not even a play exactly but the synopsis of a play, yet by the end of the chapter I'm very moved by the characters, she presents a snappy and wistful, almost Chekhovian conclusion, and I'm thinking: I'd see that play! The conclusion builds toward two of the main characters having a late-life reunion with the beautiful woman who crossed their paths some 50 years in the past, she now dying of cancer (the mother of Burton's son, and she's now the head of the regional theater co.), and I'm expecting, or at least fearing, a melodramatic ending - either she dies just before they get there, or everyone dissolves in tears, or something like that, but once again Walters brings off the near-impossible and plays the conclusion low key and awkward, as it probably would be in life - and they rips off a final chapter in which she gives us a superabundance of plot detail bringing forward the lives of many of the characters in the novel, major and minor, with I think just the right touch - the kind of closing sequence we see a lot now in movies, but here with a novelistic level of detail - and it works mainly because she's not trying to overwhelm us with info or dazzle us with her talent for invention but just to show us the complexity and surprises and happiness and failure in everyone's life, how decisions made early in life can have vast repercussions for many lives, yet how nothing is irrevocable or beyond recovery - a very beautiful ending to a fine and entertaining novel.