Fiction:Theodor Adorno once memorably declared there would be no poetry after Auschwitz. The effect of the September 11th World Trade Centre bombings - perhaps the biggest wound in the American psyche - on Pulitzer Prize-winner Jane Smiley was close to Adorno's imperative to silence; the events induced writer's block. For Smiley, who has produced 11 novels and three non-fiction books over the past 20 years, it was a shock to discover that, after the Twin Towers, the act of writing was "insoluble, unjoyous and unstimulating".
Her answer was to read. A hundred novels, to be precise, over three years which she turned into - yep, you've guessed it - another book, entitled 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, a cross-genre work, part autobiography, part literary criticism. More importantly, though, her reading regimen helped Smiley to believe in fiction again: "It inspired in me the idea that it was okay to go on as a novelist in good faith and that there could be room in my consciousness and the national consciousness about thoughts other than terrorism and 9/11."
Which is ironic, given that Ten Days in the Hills, her return to fiction, is set in the initial days of the Iraq war - surely the most concrete result of post-9/11 paranoia. Set out like a movie script, the book opens with an ageing film director, Max, and his lover, Elena, waking up luxuriously late the morning after the 2003 Oscars in his opulent home in the Los Angeles Palisades. By day's end, the couple's indulgent solitude has been invaded, however, by an impromptu gathering of stray friends and extended family, who elect to stay for the 10 days of the novel's title.
THE CAST FOR this state-of-the-nation novel, along with Max and Elena, includes Max's former wife, a half-Jamaican actress named Zoe, and her partner Paul, a New Age healer; Charlie, Max's boyhood friend; Stoney, his agent; Isabel, his daughter; Simon, Elena's son by her previous marriage; Delphine, Zoe's 76-year-old mother; and Cassie, her best friend. During the next week and a half, they trade stories, jokes and insults, sleep with one another, argue, fight and make up, or part. Dreams, accounts of therapy sessions, newspaper stories, long-lost memories, plots of films and Hollywood gossip form the multi-layered, Decameron-inspired narrative.
In Ten Days in the Hills, Elena is the pivot, standing in for Smiley, one suspects. A writer of self-help manuals and a Hollywood outsider, she is the only one in the company consumed by the war and deeply troubled by its apocalyptic portents and shares Smiley's own loud opposition to Bush and the Iraqi conflict. Elena clashes noisily with Charlie, the only avowed Republican in the company, and is peeved by the fact that the uninvited house guests are happy to watch disaster films in the midst of a real war, while the newspaper coverage goes unread.
But Elena is not the only one to stand and deliver; all Smiley's characters are garrulous, making pages-long utterances that come out like speeches scripted by Smiley. And for all the buoyancy of the inventive narrative structure - one story sparking off another - there is a flat-footed feel to the dialogue and a curiously period feel to the hectic war rhetoric. The old buzz words of WMD and surgical strikes now seem positively archival given the current state of affairs in Iraq.
IT'S NEVER TOO late for a good story, well-written, says a character in one of the disaster movies Max and his friends watch. Too true, but one feels in the case of the Iraq war, this is not it. Hollywood types obsessing about sexual problems, movie deals, fading looks and stalled careers when the world is going up in smoke are easy targets for scorn and it's not clear whether Smiley is asking us to care about them, or is busily sending them up. In the end, she even fails to keep faith with Elena, who is given a "cure" for her end-of-the-world neurosis by New Age healer Paul, almost certainly a charlatan.
Smiley is one of the US's most versatile writers; she never produces the same book twice. Her Pulitzer prize-winning novel, A Thousand Acres, was a searing re-imagining of King Learset in the American Midwest; Moowas a satire of campus life; and Horse Heavenan exploration of the horse-racing set. Her ability to enter and inhabit such diverse worlds comes to the fore once again in this novel, as she steeps herself and her readers in Hollywood lore, both old and new. But the end result is less Ten Days That Shook the Worldand more Ten Go Camping in Hollywood.
Mary Morrissy is a novelist and short story writer
Ten Days in the Hills By Jane Smiley Faber and Faber, 449pp. £16.99