In 2005, Jane Smiley published a reader’s and writer’s guide, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. The title seems particularly apt, since there are at least 13 ways of looking at Smiley’s own fiction. Few people love every last one of her novels, but it is in part her delightfully unpredictable range that makes her one of our finest contemporary writers. She has written academic satire (Moo); sprawling novels of manners (Good Faith); historical fiction (The All-True Travels and Adventures of Liddie Newton), not to mention a massive saga (The Greenlanders); a dark, sophisticated murder mystery (Duplicate Keys); and finely grained domestic studies (most famously the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ten Thousand Acres, but also Paradise Gate, Barn Blind, and—possibly my very favorite piece of 20th-century American fiction—the novella The Age of Grief). In her latest novel, Ten Days in the Hills, Smiley melds interpersonal drama with political commentary, and the result is dazzling.
Just as Ten Thousand Acres is—among other things—a feminist reinterpretation of KingLear, Ten Days in the Hills is a riff on Boccaccio’s Decameron. Written in the 1350s, Boccaccio’s classic centers on ten Italians sequestered together outside Florence in an attempt to escape both boredom and the bubonic plague. They pass the time telling one another morally instructive, bawdy, salacious, entertaining, tantalizing stories, with time off for holy days.
Unsurprisingly, Smiley’s crew doesn’t observe the church calendar. Max and Elena are middle-aged lovers who found each other in Hollwood. He’s a movie director who’s not worked in a while; she writes self-help manuals. Both are parents of 20-something kids. Both are lefties. Both are passionate, and both have learned a thing or two about themselves and the world. Around Max and Elena assembles a quirky group of friends and family, who show up, more or less uninvited, for what evolves into a long house-party. There’s Zoe, a famous actress who happens to be Max’s ex-wife; her weird, New Agey boyfriend; Elena’s son; Max and Zoe’s daughter, Isabel; Zoe’s aged mother, Delphine; Delphine’s dearest friend; Max’s old buddy Charlie, recently divorced, myopically right-wing, utterly lacking self-knowledge, and generally irritating; and Max’s agent, Stoney, who at first appears to be a minor figure but becomes one of the more complex characters in the novel. Seemingly adrift in early middle age, he’s not a great agent, but he inherited the business from his dad, whose shadow he can’t escape and whose memory possesses him.
Boccaccio isn’t Smiley’s only template. She likes to juggle genres, and here she is both parodying and paying homage to the Hollywood Novel as well. Elena’s son is neglecting college in order to work as an extra in a porn flick (he says it’s an art film, poking fun at the conventions of soft porn). Max has a cinematic bee in his bonnet. He wants to make a movie about making love with Elena. The whole movie would be just one long session in bed, sex and nuzzling interspersed with a conversation. Stoney is convinced this would be a disaster, but Max insists it will be the next My Dinner With André.
All sorts of attractions and entanglements propel the story. Is Max still in love with his ex-wife? Is she attracted to Elena’s son? Will Elena’s son and Max’s daughter turn out to be a perfectly matched, if faintly incestuous, couple? Will Charlie, clearly besotted with Zoe, get her into bed? And so on. (Smiley’s sex scenes can be lyrical or matter-of-fact, quietly erotic or bawdy, and she can also bring a wickedly satirical edge to the subject.)
But how does this free-style house-party (which shifts location for a while to another mansion, the domain of eccentric Russian émigrés) in any way recall Boccaccio’s set-up? Well, the novel is set in 2003 (the action begins a day after the Academy Awards), and for Elena, America’s invasion of Iraq is so overwhelming and upsetting, she is beside herself with anger and grief. This is the disaster that she is fleeing, the equivalent of the plague; at the same time, it is all she can think about and all she wants to talk about, and she is alternately prophetic and annoying. (But what prophet is likable all the time?)
Caveat lector: This is a decidedly political book, and if political differences interfered with your appreciation of Anne Lamott’s Plan B or Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams, say, chances are you won’t get very far with Ten Days in The Hills. Indeed, you may be rolling your eyes this very minute and thinking “Oh, please. Escaping the plague is one thing. Hiding out because you’re upset about the war? That’s just ridiculous.”
In Smiley’s defense, I will admit that I had trouble leaving the house or even getting out of bed for about a week following the 2004 election. Smiley herself has said that Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel (which includes a discussion of the Decameron) was born in part because, after 9/11, she found herself unable to write fiction, so she turned instead to reading and writing about fiction (she worked her way through 100 novels, just as Boccaccio’s characters tell 100 tales).
And exposing the differences and similarities between the situation of Boccaccio’s Florentinians during the plague and Americans during the Iraq War is, indeed, part of the point. For the characters in Smiley’s novel, the war is both literally and imaginatively removed, far off and abstract in a way that the plague was not for 14th-century Italians. It is that sense of being removed from the war that creates Elena’s (and Smiley’s) burden – to persuade the others that the war really is as awful, as destructive, as horrific as she believes, and as harshly diagnostic of the state of the nation. Elena wants to awaken her companions to a danger that can feel deceptively distant.
Love poses different dangers in the two books as well. As many critics have noted (none more trenchantly than Jessica Levenstein), in the Decameron, Boccaccio couples love and death, eros and thanatos, reading them as twin forces that both disrupt and rip open ordinary life. The plague interrupts the ordinary life of the characters, who are unable to halt the disease’s march; eros undoes its victims. Just as no one can stave off death, so too, in the Decameron’s tales, those who try to stop the course of erotic ardor—parents and siblings who try to shield daughters and sisters from the destruction of passion—prove helpless before love’s course. Desire is itself a relentless force.
In Ten Days in the Hills, desire is ubiquitous, but it is not especially disruptive. How could it be, given a culture in which acting out erotic dramas is anything but transgressive? This is not to say that Smiley’s characters are unable to be surprised by love. Rather, it is a different kind of love that takes people by surprise in Ten Days in the Hills—not passionate carnal desire, but a tender love that promises to be more sustaining. The sweet emotional center of the novel is the love affair between Isabel and Stoney. The affair, which began when Isabel was a teenager and has continued on and off, at first seems unpromising—indeed, downright creepy, though banal in its creepiness. As the novel opens, Isabel wants to break things off with Stoney, toss away the affair with other artifacts from her adolescence, and early on this affair seems to be just another indicator that Stoney is a total loser.
But gradually, as the characters unfold, one comes to see Stoney and Isabel differently, and readers may find themselves wondering not when Stoney will grow up and get a life, but whether or not Isabel is mature enough to see what is right before her eyes: someone who knows and loves her; someone who wants to marry her and be faithful to her; someone who, though perhaps a flop by the skewed, superficial standards of Hollywood, is, in fact, a prince.
Lauren F. Winner is a visiting lecturer at Duke Divinity School. Ten Days in the Hills
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