On Location

While war rages in Iraq, some Hollywood friends gather to talk, watch movies and have sex.

TEN DAYS IN THE HILLS

A Novel

By Jane Smiley

Knopf. 449 pp. $26

A violent war has begun, and a small group of family and friends has taken refuge in a secluded house high in the hills to escape the fighting. Actually, they are hoping to escape news of the fighting. They're in southern California. The fighting is in the Middle East. But most of them don't approve of the conflict, and, besides, the house where they've holed up has a pool and a terrific room in which to watch movies. It's March 2003, and the war in Iraq has just begun.

Such is the backdrop for Jane Smiley's new novel, Ten Days in the Hills, a work modeled in part on Boccaccio's Decameron. Instead of fleeing the plague, however, the ensemble in Smiley's book is hoping to exist for a short while in a world free of newspapers, television and reports from the front -- distant as that front is. They have withdrawn the night after the Academy Awards to the home of a 58-year-old movie director named Max, "a mansion that cascaded down a mountainside in Pacific Palisades, looked across Will Rogers Memorial Park at the Getty Museum, and had five bedrooms, a guesthouse, and a swimming pool down the mountainside (three flights of stairs) that caught the morning sun." And then there are the gardens. Moreover, this is only the first of two homes -- the second so palatial that it makes Max's place look like a shabby bungalow near LAX -- in which the pilgrims will take shelter.

In those mansions, they will tell stories about their lives and their beliefs, and they will forge new friendships and alliances (some sexual, some political).

Among the group? There is Max's girlfriend, Elena, an articulate and impassioned opponent of the war who writes self-help books. There is his best friend from childhood, Charlie, newly separated from his wife and hoping to rejuvenate himself with a regimen of vitamin pills he both pops and sells. Charlie supports the war wholeheartedly. There is Max's first wife, the exquisitely beautiful movie star Zoe Cunningham, with whom Max is still friends, and Zoe's new lover, an unflappable holistic therapist (and, perhaps, charlatan). There is Max and Zoe's 23-year-old daughter, Isabel, and Max's agent, Stoney -- who is the son of Max's original agent, who has died of cancer. Stoney and Isabel have been on-again, off-again lovers since Isabel was 16 and might now be willing to allow their clandestine romance to become both public and serious, despite the reality that Stoney is 15 years older than Isabel. Rounding out the group are Zoe's mother, her mother's great friend, and Elena's son, a halfhearted college student but an exuberant, uninhibited and insatiable lover.

In the course of 10 days, Smiley allows us to watch the characters change and grow -- or, in some cases, not grow.

Since this is Hollywood, one of the tale's more illicit pleasures is the way everyone frames everything in terms of a film: actual movies and the fictional ones that Smiley concocts (including my personal favorite, "Aloha, Topper," a sequel to the 1937 Cary Grant/Constance Bennett film about a couple of fun-loving ghosts, moved now to Hawaii). But there must be a hundred actual movies referenced as well, so that, for example, when Stoney is ruminating about what a terrible actress Zoe is, he thinks, "She was . . . the sort of actress who moved twenty facial muscles in preference to two, and so he couldn't watch any of her movies -- she always seemed to him to be bursting off the screen, like the monsters in Alien. "

Meanwhile, Max is trying to decide whether his next project should be a remake of "Taras Bulba," which a group of wealthy Russians wants to finance, or a small homage to love at mid-life, which he would call, "My Lovemaking with Elena." The first idea would be a massive epic filmed partly on location in Ukraine. The second would be an intimate movie with only two actors, a film Max envisions as "My Dinner with Andre" but with sex.

Occasionally, Smiley's use of the war in Iraq feels extraneous, such as when Max and Elena attribute his sudden impotence to the news from the Middle East. Moreover, some of her attempts to remind readers of The Decameron are a tad heavy-handed, including the group's lengthy discussion of "The Seventh Seal," Ingmar Bergman's classic film about one man's chess match against Death in the midst of the plague.

But Smiley has her tongue firmly in her cheek and uncharacteristic patience with the superficialities and self-importance of her Hollywood movers and shakers. There may be scenes here that should have wound up on the cutting room floor, but what tale from Tinseltown can't use a little editing? By the time the final credits were rolling, I was more enamored of Smiley's players than I was annoyed, and when the lights came up -- excuse me, when I closed the book -- I was grateful for the time I had spent with them in their sheltered and sumptuous little world. ·

Chris Bohjalian is the author of 10 novels, including "Midwives" and "The Double Bind," which was just published.