Customer Reviews

Ten Days in the Hills

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(37)

 

 

Jane Smiley does indeed have a keen ear and masterful touch with dialogue, but....449 pages of eavesdropping on the rambling conversations of these assorted Hollywood stereotypes does not add up to an engrossing read. Like many others, after 150 pages of hoping for some redeeming quality in this work, I threw my copy in the trash. This book evoked the same visceral reaction I have to people carrying on cell phone conversations in public places - the instinct for fight or flight.

Much as I hate to, I have to cast my vote in the negative column. Usually, a book written by a writer as gifted as Jane Smiley would garner an automatic 2 stars just to start. Her way with words is masterful - usually. But this novel is so mind-numbingly slow, and the characters so egocentric and shallow, that it would be difficult to spend 30 minutes in a room with them in person, never mind trying to spend umpteen pages reading about their every physical sensation. It seems none of them have very many intellectual sensations. Seinfeld was the show about nothing, but the characters and conversation were quirky, honest, and funny. This book about nothing has none of those advantages.

This book has a lot of sex, but it has no redeeming importance, social, politcal, personal, or otherwise. It isn't just that the basic premise of analagizing the War in Iraq to the Great Plague in Europe in the 14th century is rediculous and offensive. Worse still is the fact that the book has no reason for being written or read. It is vacuous.
I wish I had read my fellow suckers' reviews and saved my money and my time. I got to page 35 and couldn't remember much of anything, because there is nothing memorable. I kept reading, but it only got more dreary. Amazing that Knopf published this MS that should have been left on the cutting room floor as a novel out-take. An equally good alternative would have been to have all the copies put into a burn bag in the CIA so that no one would have even known it existed. The author should be ashamed. The editor should be dismissed.
This book may have some use other than recycling. You can serve the Green Revolution by stoking your wood-burning stove.

By trying a structure and style that are not based on traditional plot structure and character development, Smiley takes the reader into unfamiliar waters, and it is not always entertaining. But does a novel have to be entertaining? Does every book we read have to deliver the same satisfaction of a neatly wrapped package? Isn't that more the role of television? For me, I don't mind a challenge when an author is trying to something different. I found Ten Days in the Hills to be deeply engrossing, dense and true. Smiley recreated the conversations of her characters with alarming authenticity. But for sure, this book is not for everybody, as is evident from the trouncing she gets here in Amazon.

The other risk Smiley takes is her choice of characters. Rich, snotty, Hollywood types with huge houses and too much sex. What's not to hate? But I admired the writing and the concept behind the work, if not the characters themselves, and to me her novel is a fascinating experiment. Suspend the need to relate to the characters on a personal level and the book comes alive in a very unique way. That's what I thought.

I have loved everything Jane Smiley has written, but this book was tedious. I skipped entire passages because they were repetititve and added little the story. If you haven't read any Smiley, skip this book and go directly to The Age of Grief.

It's 2003, the war in Iraq has just begun, and a group of Hollywood players converge on the home of a movie producer for an unplanned and seemingly interminable week and a half. The characters are somewhat interesting: there's Max (the producer) and his lover Elena; his daughter and her son; his ex-wife, the gorgeous and famous Zoe, along with her lover, the yoga practitioner/ guru; the agent who is trying to take Max in a `relevant' new direction; the childhood friend who is a big blowhard; Zoe's mother, who lives on Max's property despite the divorce; and the longtime neighbor. We are treated to graphically detailed descriptions of sex, down to the anatomical, practically molecular nitty-gritty. Each character also expounds on life, war, religion, George W. Bush, freedom, movies, blah blah blah. Not one character really breaks out of a mold of self absorption; each one seems to simply want to stridently hold forth and impress the others.
I know Smiley is attempting to model this book on Boccaccio's Decameron, and the characters do tell stories, mostly about their own lives, but when I reached a slightly more than halfway point in the book, I began to feel like Zoe's guru/lover, as he listens to her daughter `drone on': "He sighed. They made him sigh. It was not precisely that they were boring, but more that they caused the expansion of time, so that every second, every moment, swelled to infinity.... It was as if he could remember every thought he had ever thought, and every one of them was futile." That Smiley is aware of her characters' limitations is obvious, and I `get' the satire implied. This insider knowledge is not, however, enough to make me care.

I was captured by page one. A sunny morning, white sheets, two naked bodies of lovers comfortable with themselves and each other set the mood perfectly for the story to come. This is not a book heavy on plot and twists. It's a tale of relationships between friends and family, watched by a mature narrator who has the time to stop and admire dew drops captured on leaves. If you are the sort of person who reads to find out what happens next, you will not appreciate this delicate web. If you read fiction to feel, to empathize, to expand your emotional core, then you will love it as much as I did.

I love this author. I awaited the publication of this book with the anticipation that I would be spending time in the company of a master. I was not disappointed. I enjoyed the characters and the setting. The tales that are told are entertaining - much has been made of the sexual content but it did not strike me as gratuitous. And the political setting, the background of the war in Iraq shading the obsession or avoidance of whoever was addressing us, well, as a fan of Ms. Smiley's blogs, I was glad to hear the nuances of voices addressing our times. It is difficult to write a book that is contemporary - there are a lot of landmines in doing that. This one is of the moment, and yet it will be read in the future for the feel of what it is like to live now.

I just got to page 177 and gave up. I was hoping it would get interesting, but it never did. Strange characters, long dull conversations, nothing doing. It's supposed to be set in Pacific Palisades, but if they can see the Getty from the house they are in, they have to be in Brentwood. A small detail, but still...get serious.

I have loved Jane Smiley's fictional writing and was first "hooked" by Duplicate Keys. I read A Thousand Acres: A Novel about a thousand times to enjoy every angle of the relationships. Moostill makes me laugh. Maybe I was not in the right place for this book, but I thought both the sex and the war elements were contrived. The relationships were so buried in the sex and war that I kept taking breaks from the tedium of sorting through it all. I clearly recall my own helplessness in those early days of the war, but I could not relate to these characters whose responses ranged from literal impotence to clandestine news snatching. Anyway, it all leaves me feeling a little sad - these poor characters need lots of help.