Book Review: Readings

Ten Days in the Hills

by Jane Smiley

Knopf, 449 pp., $26

Early in Jane Smiley's Ten Days in the Hills, a film director with a fading career muses on shooting his version of My Dinner With Andre featuring a couple in bed and thoroughly naked. That's indeed what Pulitzer Prize-winner Jane Smiley has created here: a talky, bawdy book that says a lot about the vapidity of Hollywood and even more about the humanness of the 21st century American. Smiley has previously looked for inspiration from academia (Moo) and Shakespeare (A Thousand Acres: A Novel). Her model here is Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, a 14th century tale of 10 people taking refuge from the plague by going to the nearby countryside where they tell stories and get jiggy with it.

Smiley, an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq, has chosen that war, as seen in its early days in 2003, as her form of black death. The character Elena, who writes self-help books – including Here's How to Do EVERYTHING Correctly! – is obsessed with the war and spars with the group's lone Republican about weapons of mass destruction. Smiley, who studied the medieval period as a graduate student, has said her fascination with The Decameron stems from the "resolution of the people, the characters to create a space inside the disaster where they contemplate all kinds of things. Fun things, crazy things, tricky things."

That's the heart of Ten Days: Smiley has taken a step toward rejecting the traditional novel's story arc and instead moved toward a form that is both old and new. It's all about the story. The irony (and Smiley is very big on irony) is that Hollywood is the land of formulaic scripts, and much of the book is devoted to an appreciation of that form. Smiley even acknowledges "every director and commentator on every DVD who bothered to add 'special features.'" But, ultimately, her message here is one of art and its ability to free the artist. Forget the idiots in Washington: Get naked; make art; tell stories. Could there be any saner advice for the age we dwell in?