Oddly, a replay of At Paradise Gate with more sophsticated and complex characters, setting, and relationships. As with two other Smiley novels, I was not quite able to finish although I enjoyed reading it. This is due to lack of a plot. Smiley also has a strange take on the war in Iraq (which is ostensibly the occasion for 10 adults to gather in a house party and tell stories). The most anti-war character, sharing SMiley's views, is the most shrill and unpleasant.

The novel is set in Hollywood and has a good reflection of LA character and culture. One curious twist is that the party moves into a huge house across the highway owned by a rich Asian Russian. The house is fairy-tale sumptious, unrealistically rich. The owner has modeled the various bedrooms to reflect icons of Western culture and art. Is this a comment on east meets west, and how so? Is it from the Decameron which I haven't read?

I'm a huge fan of Smiley's writing and regard The Greenlanders and A Thousand Acres as two of the best books I've ever read, so I was slightly surprised to get stuck with this book twice before I started again and read it all the way through. One of the things that is notable and enjoyable about Smiley's work is her constant play with literary form, with a very explicit consideration of the fit the between genre and subject matter. This works particularly well in the coupling of Norse chronicle with the tale of the demise of the C13 Greenland colony and the blend of picaresque and confessional novel form with the The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton. Ten Days in the Hills is modeled on Boccaccio's Decameron with each day of the ten day a mosaic of the past and present stories of the characters, with the Iraq war occupying the narrative place of the Black Death. Somehow, whilst the individual parts are at turns, delightful, engaging and though-provoking, there is an sense in which the elements don't reconcile into a meaningful whole, even after reading and leave the reader with a heightened sense of the complexity of life, where exquisite art, natural beauty, love and love-making sit alongside war, greed and suffering. This is no doubt intentional, but it means we too, as readers, are denied the pleasure we get from sense-making function art can provide in a complex and contradictory world.

I'm not sure how to review this book. In terms of plot, this receives about 1 star. Basically, nothing happens other than people eat, talk and have sex.

If I'm rating the book for the stories, then I give it 4 stars. Some of the tales are super weird (and sound stilted in a way that it doesn't feel like the character is talking but more reciting) but the stories certainly had high entertainment value and are what drove the book.

In terms of characters, most of them seemed like they could be real. Simon and Paul and Stoney and Isabel especially jumped off the page (although Elena and Cassie were not as clear). I really enjoyed the romance between Stoney and Isabel, too. So that bumps up the rating a bit because I did want to know what happened between everyone. (Will Isabel and Zoe start to understand each other? Will Simon and Isabel become friends? When will Zoe realize that Paul is a total quack and weirdo?)

However, if I'm reviewing this for the "real"ness of the story (not the plot, but just the believability of the concept), I'm inclined to give it 1 or 2 stars. The whole "let's sit out the war in our LA mansion with a bunch of random visitors who all ended up visiting the same week" seemed WAY trumped-up to me. It's like Smiley was trying to fit a square peg in a round hole (which I think she was since she wanted to do a modern day Decameron). If this took place during WWII or a war happening on U.S. soil, it would have made more sense that these guys were hiding out. As it stood, the war had just started, LA is far from Iraq and no one had friends or family overseas (yet).

So I average this out and gave it 3 stars.

A modern approach to "The Decameron." Smiley sets the novel in LA, just after the war in Iraq started and populates it with an aging movie director and various friends and family. This is an extremely literary book. I had a hard time believing that people involved in the film industry would be so literate and articulate. The device of people telling stories is a fabulous imitation of Bocaccio, but the long, rambling, and coherent conversations were hard to believe. I have recently read "13 Ways of Looking at the Novel," so I noticed her use of many of the books she discussed there. The digressions in this novel made it go on a bit to long, but I couldn't help admiring Smiley's writing chops.

Ugh. Have to be honest, hard to for me to get through. It's been a long time since it took me this long to get through a book. But! If I start one I finish it, and I wish I could say I was glad I did. Not so. I have read Jane Smiley before, and enjoyed Ten Thousand Acres. Found this one to be way overbloated with endless conversation, unbelievable characters, and gratutious sex scenes that really felt out of place at times. Pretty pointless and unmeaningful, and not very likely that a group of people would hole up in a luxe Hollywood manse for 10 days at the onset of the Iraq war, hiding from the TV and newspapers. I was bored with this one, was pushing through at the end just to call it done. Glad to be finally rid of, wish it had only taken me 'Ten Days'. Don't bother.

This was a good book, but it did not come close to my favorite Jane Smiley books (Moo, Horse Heaven, the really depressing one based on King Lear.) It's always interesting to see authors try to deal with incorporating 9/11 into their work and I haven't yet read a book where I didn't feel the author's own awkwardness coming through somehow (although maybe that's me projecting onto the reading?). Jane Smiley is an excellent writer, but this is a very 'talky' book (balanced by a fair amount of sex), which is something I can quite enjoy, eavesdropping on conversation after conversation. However, when I finished the book, I remember looking around for the nearest crappy adventure or spy novel where stuff just HAPPENS. I needed more plot...

By the way, Jane Smiley also suffers from the worst titles I have ever come across. She consistently has titles on her books that make me actively NOT want to read them, except for the decent title of this book. But don't let the rest of her titles turn you off: she's wonderful.

Oops! I left this in the hills (also known as the glove compartment of my father's old Honda in Encino)... along with an unopened pack of Mad Libs from Pea Soup Andersen's, a map of San Francisco, and some Dutch licorice.

NOW:
Finally caved and bought this book last week, before my trip home to Los Angeles and San Francisco. I figured that this would make good, or at least passable, airplane reading as well as being entirely apropos of my journeying, as well as taking my mind off the crazy-making wedding I was about to attend. Really? What I was thinking? This book is full of SEX and vacuous people and money, so it must be the awesomeness, correct? Correct? Somehow, I missed the fact that this book is about sex, and vacuous people, and money, and oh yeah, the war in Iraq and that the characters who fill its pages never shut up, especially when they're fucking.

So I think it's kind of boring.

I'll give it another shot after I finish the so far far more engrossing  Alive in Necropolis.

THEN:
I'm not a huge Jane Smiley fan, or even a fan at all, but I love The Decameron (duh, I'm a Chaucer nerd) and I love L.A. (just like Randy Newman) so it seems that this book could be, should be, right up my alley (eew).

this was probably better as an audiobook in the car, rambling shaggy-dog stories and miscelleous episodes and all. I didn't hate it; sure didn't love it. This is the first Smiley tome I've consumed, so I have no frame of reference other than the reviews. But damn she rambled. There were so many characters, like a Russian novel, with people who, frankly I didn't much care if they fucked or not, much less needing to hear the particulars of the act itself. I'm not squeamish, but I'm easily bored. I liked some characters a lot. I liked Zooey and her mother; I liked Simon, the quasi-bisexual college kid who plays a condom in an indie movie; I like the Russian subplot. The Max-Jerry-stuff and the Charlie stuff, ugh.

I really liked it at the beginning, as it's different from what I normally read (I.e., this is clearly contemporary fiction), and was immediately engrossed in the characters and their emotional lives. Smiley's writing spoke to me in this one, and reminded me of feelings I once had about 10 years ago. The characters are well thought out and drawn well, if a little myopic and unrealistic. A good play on the Decameron, which lies unread on one of my bookshelves somewhere. All that begin said, however, I did grow bored with the over verbalization and pithy reactions of the characters amour three quarters of the way through. The story could have ended before they go off to mike's house, and I would have considered it complete.

It took me nearly two years to read this novel. It would have taken more had I not forced myself to push through the last two-thirds of the book the third time I got the book from the library. While the previous sentence might indicate that I didn't like the book, that's definitely not the case. While Ten Days in the Hills is a reimagining of a classic work, a humorous exploration of caricatures of Hollywood and sex, and a statement on the Iraq War, it is also EXTREMELY DENSE.

My biggest mistake was making this novel the first one I ever read by Jane Smiley. I probably should have started with A Thousand Acres or another earlier novel and worked my way up, which is what I would recommend for anyone thinking of picking up this book.

Not at all what you would expect if you have read a lot of Jane Smiley. A strange political/soft porn/character exploration that is a bit jarring since the Iraq war is still such a major issue and this is about the first 10 days of it in 2003. Some portions are just too long and I wasn't sure I would get through, but then others are really fascinating and it does kind of get at that strangeness that a war is going on very far away and doesn't really touch your life, but yet has an impact on you. The characters are interesting if not exactly all that realistic and it explores themes of war, politics, religion, family, friendships, a bit of race and class, and does display Smiley's knowledge of film--but I don't know if I would recommend it, really. Too long and not enough other stuff to make it worth it.

I picked this up at the airport as I am currently coming out of a long drawn out and embarrassing but all too real addiction to fashion magazines. The cover promised me something that would feed my brain as well as my need for glee and shennanigans. Boy did I read the cover wrong. After getting a little bit of that 13 year old thrill during the explicit scenes, I was all too easily bored after the first 100 pages and by the time I got to 300 I invoked my new rule about actually not finishing a book. This story could have been told just as deeply and just as well in half the time. Perhaps I'm a product of the internet blogging generation, perhaps I'm suffering from my magazine hangover and still only have the attention span for 1000 words or less, but I'm willing to test that by picking up a good ol' Larry McMurtry or John Irving. I'm pretty sure I'll still be engrossed at page 450.