Jane Smiley's new novel, "Ten Days in the Hills," is set in Hollywood and features 10 individuals brought together by circumstance at the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003. They are actors and a director, parents and children, an agent and a New Age guru, sequestered in director Nathan Maxwell's fabulous hideaway with its prime view of the Getty Museum.
They would seem ready-made for contemporary cinema: A reader can visualize Dustin Hoffman as Maxwell; Rip Torn as his childhood buddy, Charlie; perhaps Frances McDormand as his love interest, Elena. But Smiley's visualization of her characters hearkens back to another era in Tinseltown.
"I would not cast them as anybody living," says Smiley during a phone interview. "I think at one point Elena tells Max, 'I would cast Dana Andrews as you.' And Max says 'I would cast Constance Bennett as you.' There's a certain type that I see them as, but they're old types rather than new types."
Inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio's 14th-century work "The Decameron," Smiley's story takes place over 10 days. The characters talk and talk and talk about the war, about sex, about food and again about sex. There is considerably more conversation than action -- at one point Max wants to make a movie similar to "My Dinner With Andre" called "My Lovemaking With Elena." While these are Hooywood types, they are not Hollywood archetypes. Smiley, whose previous novels include immersions into the world of horse racing ("Horse Heaven") and farming ("A Thousand Acres"), does not construct "Ten Days ... " as a blockbuster, but instead writes about the day-to-day circumstances occluded by red-carpet premieres and paparazzi-driven scandals.
Forgotten, Smiley says, is that "everybody is sort of people you would meet in your daily life. That's one thing that's always true.
"But another thing is the people who work in Hollywood who are actually keeping at it the way these people are; they have jobs and they do them. They don't go out and party until 6 a.m. every night, or else they wouldn't be able to get up and make that movie. That was one of those things that struck me as I read about Hollywood: It looks glamorous from the outside, but it's a hard-working town. There is maybe one group, or two groups, that are carousing, and maybe there are some actors who have to be manhandled into the limo and brought out to the location and slapped across the cheeks a few times until they wake up ... But most of the other people have lives like everybody else, and those lives are worth paying attention to."
Like "The Decameron," the impetus for the characters to meet is a cataclysmic event. In Boccaccio's work, it was the Black Plague; in "Ten Days ... " it's the war in Iraq.
"The price of their coming together is this huge, socio-political military crisis," Smiley says. "On the one hand, they're horrified, generally, at what's going on in the world, and it's making them nervous and afraid. So they do what people do when they're nervous and afraid: They gather together and hope for the best. But in the course of that thing which we can say is maybe an unfortunate thing, they rediscover the pleasure of just hanging out together."
Smiley did have great fun researching the novel, watching at least 200 movies. Knitting while she watched, she finished four sweaters -- despite admitting to being a notoriously slow knitter -- that she will wear on her book tour.
As Smiley watched the films of all genres and from all eras of cinema, she would often get up, set her DVD on pause and return to find the image framed on screen as if it was a painting. This inspired the book's resolution, and confirmed a link between books, movies and paintings.
"I was thinking about that the other day when we were watching 'Singin' in the Rain,'" Smiley says. "I paused the video in the middle of (Gene Kelly) swinging his umbrella ... I think it was swinging forward. And it was a beautiful picture. I thought, 'What a treasure of beautiful pictures the movies are.' And it's because of the aesthetic sensibilities of the cinematographers. The great cinematographers know how to form a picture inside the screen and let it continue to move. Even dumb movies, you can pause those and still be struck by how beautiful a scene is .. And that's like a novel. You can be reading a novel that's 800 pages long and you read a sentence and go, 'Wow, that is the most wonderful sentence with beautiful insight,' and yet, it's only one of thousands in a particular novel. That's the pleasure of art that has a lot of complexity: The beauty is in the little bits, and yet, they all come together and form this larger impression."
Additional Information:
'Ten Days in the Hills'
Author: Jane SmileyPublisher: Knopf, $26, 449 pages
Capsule review
'Ten Days in the Hills' may not be Jane Smiley's best novel, but it still is a work with much to recommend. Inspired by Boccaccio's medieval collection of tales 'The Decameron,' 10 people are thrown together in the wake of the Iraq war and do two things increasingly rare in American society: They talk to each other, and more importantly, listen. While the book might consist of too much conversation -- not to mention the explicit descriptions of sex -- for some, and the story occasionally meanders, it's still Smiley showing why she is one of the best contemporary American writers.
