The Hedonist

Shakespeare’s days as the go-to Renaissance source for sexy modern updates may be numbered. For her new novel, Ten Days in the Hills, Jane Smiley found inspiration in Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th-century allegory The Decameron, which consists of 100 prurient tales told by a group of young nobles holed up together in hiding from the Black Death over the course of 10 days. “I read that and thought, ‘Well, that’s a wonderful thing to do—to have death all around you, but to be eating well and telling dirty jokes and talking about sex,’” says Smiley, who is the author of 11 prior novels (including the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Thousand Acres). “I thought that was a wonderful paradox.”

With the bubonic plague (for the most part) behind us, the 57-year-old Carmel Valley resident decided to set her novel, which takes place at the Hollywood Hills abode of a middle-aged film director, during a more recent troubling time: the weeks following the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Not surprisingly, the inadequacies of government become a talking point in the novel, but the dense-with-dialogue Ten Days in the Hills also touches on topics as wide-ranging as classic movies and bawdy sex. And though readers will be tempted to draw parallels between the book’s 10 quintessentially Hollywood main characters and actual celebrities, Smiley insists that these characters are entirely fictional. “One of the great pleasures for me was making stuff up,” she says. “If I didn’t make it up and sort of betray the truth, it wouldn’t be Hollywood, would it?” Touché