Hitting an easy target: A Hollywood satire

Somehow Jess Walters's novel Beautiful Ruins reminds me of Visit from the Goon Squad: they both satirize and send up a culture about which we're all inevitably interested and curious, despite our contempt for their values and taste, i.e., Hollywood entertainment and pop music. Both are pretty funny and well done - Ruins the more so, at least based on first few chapters that have some damn-close-to laugh-out-loud lines (Client to agent: I've begun writing again. Agent: Wait, I'll call the Nobel Committee.), but when all is said and done: aren't these ridiculously easy targets? For a novel so immersed in Hollywood as Beautiful Ruins, I wonder what the point is or why Walters devotes her energy to this world that she holds in contempt - but this is only based on first two chapters, much depends on how she develops that material. Thus far, there are two plot lines that, at this point, are completely unrelated: First chapter is set ca 1960 on a small nearly deserted island off the Italian coast, on which a young hotelier has dreams of building his strip of land into a resort, when an American actress - she has a role in Cleopatra, filming in Rome, shows up on the scene and he falls in love at first sight. Second chapter, set in the recent present, Claire, a 30ish script reader for a has-been but famous director who now does shlock reality shows for the $, gets a job offer in a film archive - her dream job - and plans to quit her script job but gives it one last day and says she'll stay on if she gets one good pitch; meanwhile, a failed writer who has an afternoon appointment approaches her office ready to pitch - and we know what's gonna happen, obviously. So it's not the most sophisticated of structures but Walters's wit is sharp and her vision acute. If nothing else, the novel will offer incidental pleasures along the way - funny, snarky bits of LA gossip and glimpses of crappy proposals (many about zombies, the trend of the moment), much like the out-take bad auditions on Idol. And maybe - depending on how she joins the strands of the story - it will offer more.