I don't usually go for historical characters making a walk-on in fiction, but...

Jess Walters has been leading us on - she's wanted us to think that this guy Pat Bender, 45ish failed musician-comedian and the son of one-time bit actor Dee Moray, the romantic center of the novel Beautiful Ruins, is Dee's out-of-wedlock son from her affair with now famous but mostly over the hill director Michael Deane - the novel centers on Italian hotelier's quest to find Deane some 50 years after his encounter with Dee to get him to help try to locate her, as she's left the industry and seemingly fallen off the grid - and then Walters springs it on us that Pat's father was not Deane but was: Richard Burton. Burton now becomes a minor character in this novel - he's there because the events in Italy in 1962 center on the filming of Cleopatra - Dee had a walk-on until she left the set because of her pregnancy, and the film set, at least in this novel but I believe truthfully, was where Taylor and Burton first hooked up. Okay, I usually don't go for novels at all that involved stunt casting with historical characters - but there's something so winning and appealing about Walters's style: the story is just plain overwhelmed, and overwhelming, because of the many plot details, all the loosely strung together episodes - but they are strung together; the novel doesn't exactly feel coherent, but it does feel like a linear logical structure, with each piece of the plot logically if not exactly plausibly leading to the next. Walters's exuberant style and fecund imagination, as well as her sharp humor and terrific facility with send-ups - a drunken Burton bloviating to the Italian fishermen about a tiny craft on the choppy waters, paraphrasing from Homer and from Hamlet, is just one of the many examples of how Walters makes this novel a lot of fun. I don't 100 percent buy into the story, but it's fun along the way - good company.