Jane Smiley’s Postcard from the Edge


I’m not sure I’ve ever read a great Hollywood novel. Something always stops me after a few pages. It’s usually the characters’ names, which always sound like the monikers you bestow on a porn star or a Warhol girl. Among the classic Hollywood texts, I know I’m supposed to automatically genuflect before Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, Waugh’s The Loved One and West’s The Day of the Locust, or among the post-war writers, Irwin Shaw’s Two Weeks In Another Town and Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays. But I can’t imagine wanting to re-read any of those books. The one Hollywood novel that I recall with fondness, even though I haven’t read it since college and it’s only partly set in Hollywood, is Christopher Isherwood’s The World In The Evening.

Jane Smiley’s new novel, Ten Days In The Hills, reminds me a lot of Isherwood in her sensual, satiric evocation of place and character. Like Isherwood’s, Smiley’s book is probably more of a Los Angeles novel than a Hollywood novel. The characters could just as easily have been in some other business, but it’s set in L.A., so they’ve got to have some connection to the industry. The book is 449 pages, in really small type, and it sometimes gets lost in its tangents, but Smiley has a marvelous gift for creating characters with compelling flaws and for writing great gabs of free-flowing dialogue. It’s a book that may wear you out getting to the finish line, but it keeps pulling you forward nonetheless. It has the rounded pleasures of those old-fashioned pop blockbusters that weren’t afraid to lace a little intelligent dialogue and subtle characterization in between scenes of beautiful people having sex in gorgeously appointed homes.

Full disclosure: Smiley’s novel is apparently based on a 1353 Italian book I’ve heard of but never read, Boccaccio’s The Decameron. That book was about a group of people walling themselves off from the plague; Smiley’s novel concerns a group of Los Angelenos who, the day after the 2003 Oscars, gather in a film director’s spacious home and try to shield themselves from the Iraq war, even as raging debates break out among the characters.

The Hollywood stuff is pretty incidental. Max is a calm, mensch-like writer-director who won an Oscar years ago for penning a screenplay of a film directed by Michael Apted. Max then became a director, with some success, but he is now in his late 50s and is coasting, seemingly content to putter around his spacious hillside abode with its beautiful gardens and view of the Getty Museum. The book begins with Max and his lover Elena, in bed, the morning after attending the Oscars. They are talking about the glamorous evening, and Michael Moore getting booed, and the war, and how Max wants to make a small movie of him and Elena that would do for the indie sex film what My Dinner With Andre did for the indie yapping-and-gnoshing film.

Soon, the house fills up with a panoply of vivid characters: Not only Max and Elena, but Max’s ex-wife, the beautiful, half-Jamaican singer/film star Zoe Cunningham and Paul, her charlatan guru boyfriend; Max and Elena’s embittered, 23-year-old daughter Isabel and her lover, Max’s thirtysomething agent Stoney Whipple, who has been secretly romancing Isabel since she was 16; Elena’s son, Simon, a laissez faire lothario and half-hearted college student who has just shaved his head to play a dancing penis in a friend’s student film; Charlie, Max’s childhood friend and a hard-core Bush supporter; Zoe’s mom, Delphine, an intimidating presence who still lives in Max’s guest house and her next-door neighbor and good friend, the art dealer Cassie, a chatterbox who insists on being buried with her expensive handbag.

Stoney is trying to talk Max into remaking the old Yul Brynner Cossacks-and-horses epic, Taras Bulba, bankrolled by some mysterious Russians who want it filmed on location in the Ukraine. Max wants to make his little sex flick. Stoney, still trying to measure up after living in the shadow of his legendary agent father, worries that Max no longer has the fire for the heavy lifting of a Hollywood career:

“You want to make a Hollywood movie about an unmarried couple with grown children talking about the Iraq War and making love, with graphic sex? You know better, so this must be a joke. It has every single thing that Hollywood producers hate and despise, and that American audiences hate and despise — fornication, old people, current events and conversation.”

Of course, Smiley’s ironic point is that is exactly what her whole book is about. She takes some lightly glancing blows at the usual Southern California stereotypes — self-absorbed celebrities (Zoe); sham, New Age healers (Paul) and pill-peddling, self-empowerment types (Charlie). But the beautiful thing about Smiley’s writing is her deft hand at shading: All of these characters have just as many good points as weaknesses. Her strength is forcing us to see that people are not easily classified, or what they initially seem.

The most fascinating character to me is Elena, a woman who is obsessed with the Iraq War. I’ve met her type in real life, but never in fiction: the person who simply boils with righteous, unceasing hatred for the Bush administration and everything it stands for. You can’t joke with them; you can’t suggest that, yes, the war is awful and Bush is bad, but come on, there are other things we can focus on. They will not waver from their laser-like intensity. What Smiley captures here, almost without you realizing it at first, is this notion of how people endure during dark ages. It’s not that they are complicit with their government necessarily, it’s just that America gives them plenty of diversionary opportunities. But Smiley is asking us, through Elena, if that is how we want to be remembered. Do we want history to record us as political ostriches who kept driving our gas-guzzlers and taking our vacations and living our self-absorbed lives while something much bigger was happening? Did we do everything we could to stop it? Did we take to the streets in protest, or to the Gap for the spring sales? Elena serves as our wake-up call, if we choose to heed it, and she’s made even stronger by the time period of the book, when we now know the war didn’t turn out to be the quick, “Mission Accomplished” fix that Bush guaranteed and that Elena’s political opposite, Charlie, so fervently believes.

That Smiley is able to weave such a compelling statement into her story about upscale lovers falling apart and coming together, children straining against their parents and middle-agers wondering about their next (and possibly) last act is yet another testament to her strengths as a novelist. On top of that, you get rapturous descriptions of landscape, interior design, Russian literature, religious questing and discussions of films from Casablanca to The Seventh Seal. There’s even a three-way scene and some mild phone sex. Smiley leaves no demographic unchecked. Ten Days In The Hills may not be the great Hollywood novel, but it’s one of the better works of literary fiction I’ve read in several years.

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March 24th, 2007
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