Jane Smiley, Solving Puzzles in the Hills

'Get On With It'

For the next 13 years, Smiley kept on imagining.

She imagined King Lear on that Iowa farm, won the Pulitzer and got famous, though writing "A Thousand Acres" had felt to her -- especially compared to "The Greenlanders" -- like "a long slog with a heavy load of bricks through deep mud."

She imagined a Midwestern agricultural university, nicknamed "Moo U" -- autobiography alert: Smiley taught for 15 years at Iowa State -- as a comic metaphor for consumer capitalism run amok. That one was more fun.

She got divorced (again) and married a third time; had a son; and found herself one day in 1993 impulsively buying a horse and re-immersing herself in the world she'd loved as a girl. This led eventually to a novel, "Horse Heaven," and a nonfiction meditation on her equine obsession, "A Year at the Races." It also precipitated a move from Iowa to Carmel Valley, which for a horse lover might as well be Shangri-La.

This is where she found herself when her imagination failed.

It was the fall of 2001. Two-thirds of the way through a novel called "Good Faith," Smiley began to doubt if she could keep going. Her first and last rules of literary creativity had always been "get on with it," but this pragmatic approach had stopped working and she didn't know why.

Was it that she felt shaken by Sept. 11 and its aftermath? The ever-present distraction of horses? A recently kindled interest in spiritual things? The simple fact of her advancing age?

A less determined writer might have settled into a prolonged funk. Smiley being Smiley -- remember that proactive approach to tall-girl romance -- she set out to read a hundred novels, beginning with the 11th century ("The Tale of Genji") and working her way up to the 21st.

This self-taught course "was like gassing me up again," she says, "only with high-octane fuel." She got three books out of it, if you count "Good Faith," which she was inspired to buckle down and finish. The second was "Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel," an impassioned report on what she learned along the way.

The third was "Ten Days in the Hills," the genesis of which was a little more complicated.

Early in her 100-novel binge, in the midst of the post-9/11 anthrax scare, Smiley sat down to read "The Decameron" by the 14th-century Florentine writer Giovanni Boccaccio, which takes place during the Black Death.

"Florence was in the grip of an epidemic that possibly modern Americans cannot begin to imagine," Smiley writes in "Thirteen Ways." The order of the day was "death, dread, disease, social breakdown everywhere." Yet here were Boccaccio's main characters, 10 members of the Florentine nobility, deciding "to go out into the countryside, to take a break from the devastation, and to entertain themselves with stories."