Ten Days in the Hills (Jane Smiley)**

Ten Days in the Hills could have been great, but there just wasn’t enough to keep me interested. It starts very promisingly with Elena and Max’s discovery that, instead of spending the next few days in bed, possibly making a porno (one good thing about the book is that this never happens), they must entertain the large number of guests (including Max’s ex-wife) that have simultaneously turned up on their doorstep, having all decided to interpret an invitation to ‘come and stay sometime’ as ‘come and stay right now’.

Rather than telling at least some of them to piss off like any sensible person would, Max and Elena decide to let them all stay, even though some of them hate each other. It sounded promising, as I thought they’d spend the whole time at each other’s throats, but, as Max’s house is so huge, they mostly manage to ignore the people they hate.

There are a few token moments of snappiness, but nothing to get too excited about. Most of the book is taken up with the characters, in various combinations, talking about films and having sex. And I don’t know about you, but I find that really, really boring. I can certainly imagine living for ten days or even ten weeks without even thinking about either activity. (Well.. films anyway.)

Maybe if I’d actually seen a few more of the films mentioned, those scenes might have been more interesting, but if I felt the urge to read some literary criticism of films, I’d go and find myself a non-fiction book. As for sex, EWWWWW. I don’t mind a few details that I can giggle over - I love the bit where Simon tells everyone he’d shaved his whole body in order to play a giant penis in a film, and the Russian girls’ tit-sucking isn’t completely uninteresting either from a bi-sexual point of view. But I don’t really want to know details about the state of a fifty-eight year old man’s cock. Or any man’s cock. As my grandma used to say, there’s nothing beautiful in that sight.

What I usually do in this situation is skip the cock and move onto the interesting bits, which is the characters interacting with one another. But if you skip the cock, you’re stuck with the films. I can stand a little bit of film talk, but it was like they were at it all day (and then they were at it in the figurative sense all night). For a long time, the little I knew about the characters came from what Jane Smiley and her characters told us. There wasn’t a lot of opportunity to see it for myself.

I can pretty much list all the conversations that weren’t about about films or sex – but these usually weren’t so much conversations as monologues. Elena is the one who talks about the war; Isabel is the one who talks about anthropology; Paul is the one who talks about psychological healing; Elena, Isabel, Paul and everyone else are the ones who talked about films and sex. Charlie is the one no-one likes, but even for him there was relatively little conflict. I didn’t even realise no-one liked Charlie until he suddenly shouted out that he didn’t feel welcome. The truth is, there were so many people in the house, I’d forgotten he was there.

The problem with the first half was that the situation promised tension, but it didn’t deliver. The characters weren’t trapped in the house together. There is no snowdrift; they aren’t housemates in Big Brother. They can - and do - leave the house in order to do other things and get away from each other. Isabel and Charlie - and possibly others - live so close, they can go home any time they want to. There was no real sense that the characters were crowding each other. There was no sense that the characters were treading carefully, or that an argument could happen at any moment. When the arguments did happen, they were either so quickly resolved, I never really had time to get interested in them, or they consisted of such ridiculously long speeches, I forgot what the argument was about in the first place.

Most of the ‘ten days in the hills’ take place in Max and Elena’s house, but the last few days are spent in a different large house while agent Stoney tries to persuade Max to make a film of Taras Bulba, which sounds exactly like the sort of film I wouldn’t want to see. This section was more enjoyable because at least then there was a sense of moving forward. The fact that all of Max and Elena’s guests decided to decamp together to the house of one of Stoney’s clients is a further sign that they are really all very comfortable with one another, despite the violent hatred Smiley writes about - but there is finally a sense of progress, and personalities slowly start to come more to the fore.

There are even moments of comedy, such as when Isabel casually announces that she and Stoney will share a room - apparently the others were too busy shagging each other to notice Isabel and Stoney were at it too. And it’s quite funny when Charlie suddenly finds himself being seduced by a young and beautiful girl. And there’s even one pretty good argument between Isabel and her mother, Zoe. Finally, there are bits of tension here and there.

For the first time, you really feel there’s a real plot rather than a series of scenes. Yes, there is still way too much film-talk and sex, but I felt that if the book had started here – and this section alone was almost long enough to be a book already - with a few more conversations on other subjects here and there, and a few more of those promised arguments, I think I’d have really enjoyed it.

But by then, it was really too late.