jane smiley takes ten people, sticks them together in a couple of luxury houses in the hollywood hills a few days after the beginning of the iraq war, and watches them share meals, sunbathe, talk, and have sex. this premise could lead to a boring novel, especially considering that this is a long book, but instead i enjoyed it tremendously. i think jane smiley is one of the most reliably prodigious contemporary american writers. she concocts amazing literary meals in which every tiny morsel is as tasty and interesting as a bite of the freshest, best prepared yellowtail sushi: same complexity, same delicacy, same fullness. i love her stuff. i loved horse heaven, i loved good faith, and i love this one. maybe i love this one a little bit less than the other two, but who cares? it made me tingle with pleasure at every turn.

not much happens in this book, and i suppose that writing such a long book in which nothing happens and making it so snappy and fresh must be no mean feat. the background, as i said, is the beginning of the iraq war and that sense of despondency bordering on despair we all felt when the war started who had made ourselves hoarse shouting at anti-war demonstrations. smiley’s unlikely heroes decide (well, it’s not a decision, really, just something that happens) to huddle up and while away the beginning-of-the-war doldrums with good food, good company, and good sex. if you have read boccaccio’s decameron, on which this book is loosely modeled, you will find the same sense of pleasure and titillation in the very fact of people’s togetherness when disaster is raging outside. boccaccio’s people are younger than these folks, but these people make up for age with great vitality — sexual, for sure, but also the easy vitality that seems to cling to wealthy people in comfortable homes (or is it a california thing?). there are projects to be worked out, ideas to be hatched, food to prepare, childhood dramas to rehash, stories to tell, and, of course, lots of talk about the group itself to be had. when you put a group of people together they’ll immediately create their own gravitational field, their own little civilization with its little customs, its little history, its little tragedies and triumphs.

so this is what happens here. all of these people, by the way, are hollywood people — a movie director, one of the hottest female stars, a couple of old timers, an agent –, yet their conversations are interesting, deep, and very much alive. that’s what smiley does: she makes her characters live, so that by the end of the book you feel you know them just the same way as you would if you had spent ten days with them, hanging out in their fancy L.A. homes.

there’s a lot of talk about movies, of course, of which i am not smart enough to judge the quality, and a lot of talk about war and bush and the disaster of post-9/11 america. there’s a lot of talk about sex and there’s a lot of unspoken evolution in the feelings these folks have for one another: a daughter for her mother and the mother for the daughter and for her own mother; a man for his ex-wife and for his new partner; two casual lovers for one another; an older guy for everyone and no one, since loneliness walls him inside himself, two old women who are the undisputed matriarchs of the group for everyone and the whole world; a mother for her blooming 20-year-old son. smiley looks astutely at inter-generational dealings — that uneasy mixture of good-will, respect, and condescension that flows both ways between the older and the younger. she effortlessly deals with new age philosophies, political activism, art for art’s sake, commercialized art, race, childhood hurt, parent-children love, and the thin cocoon of wealth that simultaneously protects and exposes.

i think this book came probably out of smiley’s desire to give some creative outlet at her anger at the current government. i’m glad she wrote it. none of these people are particularly attractive, but they grow in each other’s presence; and it is certainly a mark of a great writer that she can create ordinary, possibly boring people, and make you intensely interested in them.