Jane Smiley, Solving Puzzles in the Hills

They tell 10 days' worth, many of them erotically charged. They know that when they return to the city, they may die. "But they do find repose and they do entertain themselves," Smiley continues, and in the process, "they reconstitute what it means to be human and civilized even while civilization is disintegrating around them."

She already had a vague notion of what her next book would be (that "novel about sex set in Hollywood"). What would happen, she wondered, if you built the thing around 10 characters and 10 days of storytelling, a la Boccaccio?

As for the death, dread and social breakdown component: By 2005, when Smiley started writing "Ten Days in the Hills," the Iraq war was looking like an obvious choice.

'Constructing the Puzzle'

"She's me," Smiley says cheerfully. "I mean her feelings are mine and her arguments are mine, her inability to even grasp how anybody could be for it."

The non-autobiographical writer is talking about Elena, a character in "Ten Days in the Hills" -- which begins a few days after the invasion of Iraq -- who simply cannot get the war off her mind.

The conversation has moved from the restaurant to a grassy, unused airstrip where Smiley has come to fling a tennis ball for her German shorthaired pointer. In the course of the afternoon she will also check on the five horses she keeps at a nearby equestrian center (she's worried about a favorite named Jackie, who's limping from an as-yet-undiagnosed injury) and will introduce Jack Canning, a Carmel Valley builder she's been with for the past eight years or so, to whom "Ten Days" is dedicated.

"Okay, now you've seen the dog, you've seen the horses, you've seen the boyfriend," she jokes at one point, as if summing up the components of a contented life. Asked if there's anything she'd change, she says: "I'd have that horse not be hurt. That's about it."

Back to the new novel, then, where things -- structural and emotional -- can seem a bit more complex.

"A lot of the pleasure of the book was the pleasure of constructing the puzzle," she says. She had 10 major characters to introduce and make vivid. She had 10 days over which to unfold her narrative, and she wanted each day to be of equal length: "If I came to the end of the day and it was too long, that meant something had to go."

Higher-level challenges arose from her choice of form.

"Ten Days" is a Boccaccio-like stringing together of stories that has very little in the way of overarching plot. Smiley's characters gather, eat, sleep together, speculate on one another's lives and, above all, talk. Often the talk involves movies -- an elaborate remake of "Taras Bulba," for example, or an antiwar film starring J.Lo for box office appeal -- that are unlikely to get made. Generating enough narrative tension to keep readers going became a novelistic high-wire act akin to the cinematic one Louis Malle pulled off in "My Dinner With Andre."

Smiley is well aware of the parallel. One of the movies her director character, Max, wants to make is called "My Lovemaking With Elena." When he defends his notion by saying it won't be pornography "if they have a conversation," he might as well be talking about the novel Smiley has put him in.

She keeps things moving by finding endless ways to introduce compelling stories: personal narratives, movie plots, horrific tales from the newspaper, even the elaborate lie Max's daughter tells about how she came to be sleeping with his agent. Smiley also counts on hooking readers with increasingly nuanced portraits of her 10 characters.

And here's where future biographers might want to focus on the artful blurring of the imagined and the real.

Yes, Smiley is Elena -- whose moral outrage over Iraq mirrors the opinions her creator fires off from such platforms as the Huffington Post -- though she's a far more forceful personality. But she's not just Elena.

"Max is me, too," she points out. The director opposes the war and its architects for technical reasons: "It's a task that they have not prepared for and that they cannot complete."

Politics aside, Max is also old enough to understand that what young people see as "surprise twists and happy endings" are mostly "just the same old plot points all over again." Sounds suspiciously like the kind of wisdom a thrice-divorced fiction writer might have acquired.

No, Smiley is not Paul, the bearded enlightenment seeker. Yet he's the character she most enjoyed creating, "because he's the most suspect one . . . a charlatan and yet sincere." What's more, he represents the quasi-Buddhist spiritual exploration with which Smiley has been intrigued of late.

Certainly she's not Simon, the impulsive 20-something. But what about the scene where Paul maintains that the war, like every material thing, is "all an illusion" and Simon decides to call his bluff by decking him with a sudden left hook?

Can we detect a little authorial skepticism here?

"I was sort of on the way to accepting a kind of detachment from the world," Smiley says, "but then the Bush administration came into office and I had to set aside the attempt."

Four characters down, six to go: There's plenty more in "Ten Days" to dig into. But the midwinter sun is setting on this precarious hillside paradise, so we'll have to leave the rest to those future biographers.

One thing is clear, however:

If Jane Smiley were to change her spots and write some truly autobiographical fiction, she'd have some great material to work with -- and there'd be more than just technical issues to resolve.