All of which is to explain why this week's Listener singles out not a brand-new release but one from earlier this year: Edoardo Ballerini's narration of Jess Walter's "Beautiful Ruins." Walter narrated his last novel, "The Financial Lives of the Poets," himself, and splendidly, but you can see why a pro was called in this time around. "Financial Lives" was the first-person account of one man's flame-out in the recent economic crisis, a compact novel strongly tinted by the main character's acidic gloom. "Beautiful Ruins" ranges wider in time and space, beginning in Italy in 1962 and hopping back and forth from a tiny coastal town there to modern-day Los Angeles and the Midwest.

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Even after she arrives in California, Elsa, now Laura, seems to be in constant search of waiting arms to step into. That constancy of that desire is the emotional core that drives this novel. The prose is crisp and at times, the way Straub describes Hollywood is reminiscent of Joan Didion. Straub has clearly done her research and captures mid-century Hollywood in ways that reveal a great deal of care and attention to detail.

"Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures" is not without its flaws. The title is quite literal and the novel spans Laura née Elsa’s entire life. At times, the pacing feels off, particularly toward the end of the book and some of the plot twists are too convenient, and too easily reached. The trajectory of the starlet discovered by the older producer, who has a resurgent career after fading from the public eye is one we’ve seen before.

While I truly enjoyed the novel, the details rendered so intimately, the sense of time and place Straub captures effortlessly, and the ease of the narration, I wanted more complexity, particularly in understanding the sacrifices Lamont had to make to be a wife, mother, and actress in an industry that demands a great deal from women. I wanted to see more of an exploration of this erasure of the self and how it affected Laura. I wanted a clearer sense of this threat of fracture that is implied throughout the novel but not exploited as much as it could be. I understood Laura Lamont’s outer life but wanted to know more, ultimately, about Laura Lamont’s inner life in pictures.

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