Pultizer-Winner Smiley’s Sexy Protest Novel Doesn’t Quite Penetrate

At the start of Jane Smiley’s latest novel, a Hollywood director tells his girlfriend he wants to make a movie in the bedroom, about the bedroom. He would call it “My Lovemaking with Elena” (like “My Dinner with André”). It would be dominated by pillow talk about the Iraq war, and it would be art.

Elena tells Max, “I don’t think that people would see it like that. Don’t you think the penetration would be the news, and that everyone would go to the movie to see the penetration and more or less ignore the other stuff?”

Elena has a point about Max’s would-be film, and her point could just as easily apply to Smiley’s book. With “Ten Days in the Hills,” Smiley gives the reader nine hours of Iraq pillow talk and just one of sex. But all we want is penetration.

The time is March 2003, and the scene is a home sprawled on a hill above Hollywood. It’s a fictional return to the birthplace of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, best known for her 1991 novel “A Thousand Acres” and her Twain-bashing essay “Say It Ain’t So, Huck.” Despite the advantage of returning to known terrain, Smiley stumbles, and her attempt to translate Hollywood to the page is as artificial as her political protest.

As the war in Iraq is just beginning to start, Max and Elena take refuge in the filmmaker’s outdated estate—their escape from modernity and its discontents. But they slowly realize that what they need to escape from is each other. Max’s glamorous ex-wife arrives, along with their daughter, and a menagerie of others best kept apart, not to mention a pair of maids (who like each others’ pairs).

The result is a series of trysts, each with varying degrees of success. Max and his best friend are struck by the affliction that makes Viagra viable, while Elena’s son beds a woman twice his age—Max’s ex-wife.

But outside the bedroom, hardly anything happens. Smiley islands her reader in the kitchen or the TV room, where there is nothing but talk and Iraq.

But what’s the purpose of 449 pages of opinion on entering a war four years after the fact? If this is a protest novel, it comes a bit late. Say it ain’t so, Jane.

Smiley finds a measure of redemption in her beautiful evocations of interiority. Each chapter is narrated by one character, and, like a skilled cinematographer, Smiley deftly zooms in and out.

If Smiley’s ability to render consciousness is breathtaking, her skills at creating dialogue are as well, but for the opposite reason. Smiley allows her egotistical characters to indulge in uninterrupted story recitations—open invitations to reach across the novelistic fourth wall.

When Smiley attempts snappy banter, the result is badly scripted conversation. Take this scene at an outdoor pool: Max’s 23-year-old daughter reclines among a pile of towels with her father’s Hollywood agent, a man twice her age. She touches his erection.

“She said, ‘It is hot.’

“‘And your hand is cold. I like that. It’s refreshing.’

“‘May I stroke it?’

“‘I wish you would.’”

Smiley’s pre-coital dialogue is so formal it’s laughable, and it’s not only a sign of her distance from real life. Smiley is so caught up with the academic arguments of war that she loses touch with the things that make a novel: characters, narrative, and a personal aesthetic.

But even if characters are ill-sketched and the narrative remains thin, Smiley has a gift for identifying beauty and breaking it down.

Back in the bedroom, Max films Elena with a camcorder: “He lifted the camera to his eye again, and focused it just on the curve of her back as it shaped her waist, then swelled into her buttock. When he looked at it with his eyes, it was pleasant but unremarkable. When he looked through the viewfinder, the same curve was bright and erotic, flat in a way, but alluring.”

Just as Elena’s ass is transformed into the alluring in a new medium, the Iraq-oriented portion of Smiley’s narrative might have seemed eloquent in a newspaper editorial. But by stuffing unremarkable political arguments between her erotic vignettes, Smiley reduces her “My Dinner with André” to a novelistic “Fahrenheit 9/11”—four years too late.

—Reviewer April H.N. Yee can be reached at aprilyee@fas.harvard.edu.