Jane Smiley, Solving Puzzles in the Hills

"My mom doesn't usually write from her life," Silag says, but there was enough personal history in this one that reading it became "for me, an exercise in learning how women in the family relate to each other."

The youngest of those fictional women, as it happens, is contemplating divorce from a nice-guy husband. She finds it impossible to both stay married and be herself.

In 1987, to jump ahead a bit, Smiley published a much-praised collection called "The Age of Grief." The novella-length title story, which evokes another threatened marriage, is filled with unforgettable emotional detail. Silag says she's in it -- she's the 2-year-old who won't let go of her dad -- but you don't need that autobiographical tidbit to understand that this piece of fiction, too, must have been written out of Smiley's experience.

Smiley doesn't deny it.

"It's not autobiographical in the sense that I'm not a male dentist ," she says. But in the tradition of Dickens's "David Copperfield," it qualifies. "All the facts are wrong, but the feelings are remembered."

Meanwhile, she'd written, but not yet published, the third novel she'd conceived in Iceland.

"The Greenlanders" finally came out in 1988. A 558-page epic set among the doomed settlers of 14th-century Greenland, written in the starkly hypnotic style of the Icelandic sagas Smiley had translated and absorbed, it was not -- to put it mildly -- a typical work of commercial fiction. But the fans it has attracted tend to be passionate.

"Why don't people talk about this book?" asks Jonathan Franzen, author of "The Corrections," who calls it "a work of monumental sadness and great ambition" with a perspective and pace unlike anything else he's read.

Urged to check out "The Greenlanders" maybe a decade ago by his friend and fellow writer William T. Vollman, Franzen finally picked it up last year. "Once I got hooked, that's all I did in the evening, night after night," he says. "It's such a brilliant job of imagining her way into that way of living."

Writing it resembled nothing Smiley has experienced before or since. "It was like they were telling me -- that's what it felt like," she says of how her characters seemed to take over. By the end, she was doing an astonishing 20 pages a day.

Talk about not writing from your life: At one point in the narrative, Smiley says, a hunter tries to capture a polar bear cub "and I remember thinking, God, I am totally unequipped to imagine how he's going to capture this polar bear cub. But then I did imagine it."

She laughs. "And I thought if I can do that, then anybody can. That's what the novel is for. It's for imagining stuff."