How can anyone compete with John Updike's comments in his long appreciation in The New Yorker? Smiley is a good writer; this is an entertaining book if essentially trivial. Her challenge to herself seems to have been, just how explicit can I make the sex and what can I have the people do in between? The answers are, very explicit, and I can have them talk. A lot. The descriptions of the sex are actually so over the top at times that they are just funny. Each of the talkers has a different theme, but they all sound pretty much alike. Producer, star, agent, earnest liberal, foolish conservative, young eco-kid, guru, mysterious Jamaican grandmother, old Hollywood hand who has seen it all. Oh, and a bunch of Russians. All the talk gets these characters beyond stereotype, but there isn't one that you end up liking very much. There are some provisional resolutions, but the interest really lies in the stories these people tell about themselves and, occasionally, about others. I did like the many movie references, and the sense that these people understand themselves only in relation to characters on the screen.

This book is about politics and sex. And it is words, words, words, words. How does Jane Smiley do it? Puportedly, based upon the DECAMERON by Boccaccio, it supposedly covers 10 days in Hollywood, but I counted 13. Since I do not have a classical education I had to look up the DECAMERON and I guess the keyword is transformative. Just to say, lots of "characters" that are sort of related to one another, congegrate in the home of the aging director Max, and teach him, help him, coerce him and suggest to him the reasons that he should make a new epic movie. There is alot of eating and making of food and making of love and talking, talking, talking, talking. I could never talk that much if my hair was on fire. I think day four and five are really swell in terms of the Bush administration and why Jane Smiley hates Bush. Pretty entertaining but really long.

I love Jane Smiley so much. Her versatility is astounding - in addition to fiction, she writes amazing essays, literary criticism, and biographies - and she has pulled off everything from a Greenlandic saga to short stories to a multi-volume American family epic. This one is darkly hilarious. It’s great even if you just take it at face value as a contemporary comic novel, but it’s also a surprisingly sophisticated homage to medieval storytelling. (It was inspired by the Decameron, which I haven’t read, but I have read other things like the Canterbury Tales and had a delightful time noticing all the thematic similarities in this book. Its raunchiness could be straight out of the Miller’s Tale, for example.) Bonus: The characters in the Decameron were holed up telling stories to each other while they were in lockdown during an outbreak of the plague. Even though Smiley subbed in the Iraq War as the framing device in her novel, it still makes for nice topical reading in Covid times.

An early Smiley novel (2007) which showed her already wonderful ability and proclivity to cryptically introduce us to a large constellation (12 persons, in this book) of a family and their friends and their lovers, all in a rush in the first 19 pages!)like a dam bursting. And then proceeding with a whirl wind of bits and pieces of each characters' current thoughts, back stories, and private desires. We then must try to keep up with all the fantastic glib conversations, and with the various unexpected revealing by each character. SO fun, and So challenging.

A tip: Based on my past experience with Smiley’s many-charactered stories of multi-generational families, I quickly paused after 20 pages to get a notepad and draw a genogram of the relationships between the 12 characters; it really helped me keep track!

I'm not sure why this book did not appeal to me. I've always liked Jane Smiley's works, and the subject matter -- politics, Hollywood, family and sexual relationships -- are elements of a novel that I usually can relate to. But I grew tired and bored as the novel wore on. The setting is the Hollywood Hills and the book takes place right after Oscar Night in 2003, shortly after the beginning of the U.S. invasion in the mideast. There are ten characters, each of them well developed and and each with an interesting story, but somehow I lost interest as the novel progressed. The structure of the novel was based on Boccaccio's Decameron, with lots of dialog, that seemed prosaic after awhile. Just not enough -- or maybe too much -- for me.

Copies of this novel sold out at the Melbourne Writers Festival after a session with Jane Smiley in conversation with David Francis. He described this novel as having the best headjob (or was it hand job) in literature. As it turns out, I think it was hand job. There is a little sex in this large novel - generous easy sex between a range of consenting adults. The opening is lovely - two of the main characters in bed musing on whether they should make a film about being in bed together along the lines of My Dinner with Andre. I felt lulled into something promising in terms of a range of interesting conflicts, some stuff about relationships and a real go at unpacking American reactions to their country's foreign policy.

The story is set against the backdrop of the beginning of the second Gulf War, although the characters are in Hollywood rather than Baghdad. The war is a springboard for debate along with the shifting values and ambitions of people who occupy the large house temporarily (for part of the ten days). Smiley says that she was inspired to write the book by The Decameron, which I have not read. It is described in A O Scotts review of Ten Days in The Hills: "In that book, 10 privileged Florentines — seven women and three men — took refuge from their plague-ravaged city in the accursed year 1348 and passed the time telling stories, a hundred in all." This review, titled 'Kiss Kiss, Talk, Talk' accurately captures the ways in which this large novel runs out of steam - I wanted it to be so much better than it is.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/boo... The dimunition of conflict over the course of the novel is in stark contrast to the faint news of the Iraq War that filters occasionally into the lives of these characters, reminding us of how privileged, middle class and languid they (we) are. Ultimately, not the most interesting thing to read about.

I read it; it was okay, but not my favorite Jane Smiley book, not even in the top 5. It was well written enough to see me through to the last page. It is not one of the Smiley books that I will re-read over and over for pure enjoyment of her story-telling and fascinating characters. To be honest, I must admit that there was no element of this book that appealed to me, as with some of her previous books. Good Faith was interesting because I find real estate interesting, A Thousand Acres was a tale of familiar midwestern crop farms like the ones I see all around me, Moo was interesting because of the diverse cast of characters and their vast variety of agendas regarding the university, Horse Heaven was, well, pure heaven for horse racing aficionados, but Ten Days was just un-compelling.

Reading a contemporary novel partly inspired by a much earlier text brings out interesting contrasts. In Boccaccio’s Decameron, ten young aristocrats escape to the Italian countryside from the plague and tell stories to pass time; in Smiley’s Ten Days in the Hills, the ten people represent various ages, occupations, and racial backgrounds and happen to spend ten days in two Hollywood mansions escaping news of the 2003 Iraq war. Boccaccio’s narrators talk about sex but apparently don’t engage in any, while Smiley’s storytellers do both, in various combinations. While the source of many of the stories Smiley’s characters tell is the movies, some are straight from Boccaccio. In 2003, complete escape isn’t possible, even when they watch DVDs but have no radio, TV, computer, or cellphone access. Although only some of Smiley’s ten are focalizing characters, readers learn more about them as individuals than about any of Boccaccio’s narrators. I would have enjoyed Ten Days if I hadn’t just read Boccaccio, but reading both increased the enjoyment.

A very weird Jane Smiley book. First of all, did the world need a book from Jane Smiley with lots of explicit sex scenes? No. No we did not. That said, I do respect that Smiley is constantly trying something new and making each book different from the last. Apart from all the sex, this is a book exclusively of conversations and ideas—no plot. Essentially, this is her take on “My Dinner with Andre” but in novel form. It works, sort of. But overall, I found it a bit of a slog. About halfway through, I switched from the paperback to the audiobook, which took even longer, but otherwise I might have DNF’d it. Still, there is always something “to” a Smiley novel, and even here there were interesting thoughts and ideas. But overall, it was not my favorite.

This was the first book I've read by Jane Smiley ... and, unfortunately, I was disappointed. To me this book was filled with unrealistic contrived conversations strewn among various and sundry sexual encounters. Now, don't get me wrong, I like a good sex scene as much (maybe more) than the next person, but the sex was as far from arousing as you could get. It was very clinically described and lacked passion. The conversations centered around the war in Iraq (including all the standard pro and con arguments ... nothing new here, folks). But perhaps the most annoying conversations were pages full of descriptions of films and/or books. If I'd wanted to hear those stories, I'd have read or seen them. I've heard so many good things about Ms. Smiley ... I'll give her another try one day ... but not for a while.

Another of Jane Smiley's updates of the classics, this one parallels Boccaccio's Decameron in a story of eclectic friendships isolated in the Hills of LA during the early days of the Iraq war. Smiley is an unabashed opponent of the war and it shows throughout the novel. Its an interesting exploration of extended conversations among friends, demanding at times, but interspersed with enough Boccaccio-like eroticism to keep your interest through the low spots. The last two chapters (?) make the whole read worthwhile, with an odd but revealing observation on the nature of love.

Not among her best, but worth the time.

After reading many heavily plotted books about the American West I picked this up thinking a more urbane and plotless story would be a welcome change.

And the change was good, but the story was just OK. Smiley situates nine or so people, who are all somewhat connected to Hollywood's movie industry, in two different posh vacation settings. I found it hard to care about these characters woes. Many of them were stereotypes (the anti-war liberal, the beautiful mixed race young woman, etc.), and that often makes the beginning of the story difficult to enjoy. But to Smiley's credit, they cease to become stereotypes through the course of the book. This is largely due to the fact that the book has little to no action and is really just a series of conversations (with a few sex scenes thrown in). Some of the conversations were boring, but some were rather enlightening.

In general, I did enjoy the book. But I did not enjoy it enough that I would recommend it to others. If you like Smiley (and I generally do), then it could be worth picking up.