You don't need a weatherman - untangling the plot lines in Beautiful Ruins

No sooner do I wonder about the connection between the two strands of plot in Jess Walters's Beautiful Ruins than I flip a few more pages and she ties them together, or at least crosses them: Shane, the would-be screenwriter on his way to a pitch with Claire, script reader for has-been but famous director Deane (?), meets at the locked office door Pasquale, the hotelier from the small Italian island, who, with limited English and now quite elderly (80+?) has come all this way to find the director (he'd given him is calling card decades ago) in hopes or reuniting with the beautiful actress Dee (?) who had stayed in his hotel and whom he'd fallen in love with. (Ever hear of IMDB? google?). Though improbable, it's kind of a touching scene when Claire invites the two guys in to hear their pitches - as P. explains why he's come all this way, Claire believes he's giving a poorly practiced pitch (Shane, who'd studied in Florence, helps out) - pretty funny, if that's where this novel is heading - the true story becomes the perfect pitch, the one in a million picked u off the slush pile and made? In the next chapter we head back to the 60s and learn more about P. and his island hotel and his encounter with D. - who believes she is dying of cancer; you don't need a weatherman to know which way that story line is going - it's obvious to us, and later at last to a dr., that she's pregnant. We also learn that a failed American novelist had stayed in the hotel where he worked indifferently over the years on a ms., which, however unlikely, he had left behind and D. is reading it - and we will, too, in the next chapter. The architecture of this deceptively simple (because so colloquial and easy to read) novel is quite complex, actually, and it's kind of fun to try to figure out where Walters is heading. It would be easy to say this would make a good movie - but despite its cinematic qualities, I'm not sure that's true - part of the fun is figuring out how the strands tie together, if they do, and a movie would make the subtleties more explicit and would no doubt overplay the satire. Fun to read, and we'll see where Walters takes us.