Tinseltown Scheherazades

HERE’S a story for you:

“A group of ten young people over the course of ten days” comes together “in a luxurious retreat from the horrors” of their chaotic society. They discuss “everyday concerns, and uneasiness about, on the one hand, money, and on the other hand, God.” This narrative offers “celebrity named characters in several stories.... It observes contemporary manners and ideas,” and the tales the characters tell “of mutability, of jokes and tricks and miracles, prepare them for their fates as well as distract them.”

Thus Jane Smiley summarizes Giovanni Boccaccio’s “The Decameron,” as she analyzes the origins of the modern novel in her illuminating 2005 study, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel.” The compilation of well-known tales was a common literary design in Boccaccio’s day, she tells us, but “he took the old material and worked it in the fire of current events.”

Smiley keeps the flame of Boccaccio alive in her new novel, “Ten Days in the Hills,” reheating this by-now-tepid narrative device: Lock up 10 people, bound by ties of blood, friendship, lust and happenstance, in a room and see what happens, what stories of miracles and tricks get told. In doing so, Smiley forges a blazing farce, a fiery satire of contemporary celebrity culture and a rich, simmering meditation on the price of war and fame and desire.

Instead of 14th century Florentines fleeing the Black Death, we have an assemblage of Hollywood types (and an out-of-towner or two), gathering on Monday, March 24, 2003 -- the morning after the Academy Awards and mere days into the Iraq war. The setting is the Pacific Palisades home of Max, 58, a renowned film director perhaps beginning the downward slide to career obsolescence, and his devoted, 50-ish girlfriend, Elena, the author of a series of self-improvement guides, the latest of which is called “Here’s How: To Do EVERYTHING Correctly!” Soon on the scene are Max’s cranky daughter, Isabel; her longtime secret lover, Stoney, Max’s current agent and the son of his late agent, who is still in his father’s shadow; the gorgeous Zoe, Isabel’s mother and Max’s ex, a half-Jamaican movie star/diva; her lover/guru/therapist, Paul; Zoe’s wise-woman mother, Delphine; Delphine’s best friend, Cassie; Elena’s funky, amiable 20-year-old son, Simon; and Max’s longtime friend Charlie, a right-leaning East Coast blowhard, adrift after the recent breakup of his marriage. They hang out, prepare food, argue (money, God), watch movies, work through old grievances and start up new ones and make a lot of explicit love.

Everyone has an ostensibly reasonable purpose for showing up and remaining together, but in truth they have all sought out one another (and this device). If we create our selves through the stories we tell, these characters are all fumbling to draft their personal narratives, craving both to hear and to recount the familiar plot lines once again, in search of definition, comfort, home.

And oh, do they tell stories! Life histories, experiences, travels, tales of obscure saints and offbeat sex and schoolyard struggles, of movies seen or acted in or pitched: These are storytellers telling stories about telling stories. Anecdotes about celebrities and films (real and fictional) are mixed together in a kind of literary Photoshop or Bob Zemeckis-style computer graphics, and it’s easy for both readers and characters to cross that blurry line.

For Max and Stoney, the telling of stories is empowering; Stoney wants Max to “come back” with a big-budget remake of “Taras Bulba” that would validate Stoney’s own role in life. Max wants to let go of his former blockbuster glory and turn his now more intimate life into art; the movie he wants to make is “My Lovemaking With Elena,” an exploration, in the style of “My Dinner With Andre,” of the “real connection that a man and a woman have.” Isabel and Stoney are figuring out how to tell the story of their love affair (or whether there even is a story there). Zoe awaits her next cinematic incarnation to tell her who she truly is. They’re all aware of their Scheherazadian tendencies, but they know no other way to connect -- or perhaps there is no other way, or better way. As Max says, “Telling stories is the least offensive way to communicate, because it’s the least coercive.”

Infiltrating this retreat, however, is the plague of the Iraq war, which, for these characters, is a story that’s been a long time in development and just recently released. The war creeps into their meals, walks in the garden, sex, ultimately becoming a presence in the household, a character both alluring and repulsive, the unwelcome guest everyone knows will disrupt their lives but no one can agree how to treat. Elena is desperate to escape the hermetic setup for a trip to Starbucks to get a glimpse of the New York Times; Stoney prefers everyone to think he sneaked off to the gym rather than to an hour of CNN.

The timing of this novel, as with many novels “in the fire of current events,” is problematic: Does four years’ hindsight offer unfair advantage? We know more now than most people (or fictional characters) knew at the end of March 2003, two weeks before the Saddam statue came down and little more than a month before Bush celebrated “Mission Accomplished” on the aircraft carrier’s deck. So when Charlie, in justifying the war, quotes Donald Rumsfeld and says that “at some point, you just have to trust your government to make the decisions they have to make, rather than second-guessing them all the time.... I believe that there is a whole fabric of evidence and reasons beyond what they’ve told the public that simply can’t be told at this point, but will emerge sometime later,” it’s too easy an invitation for readers in February 2007 to feel smug.

And when a distraught Elena exclaims, “Then why am I in the minority about this war? Why, when it seems so obvious to me that there are no weapons of mass destruction and that our supply lines are too long, not to mention the odds of victory and of pacifying the populace? I mean, Saddam is a cruel dictator, but the country is not engaged in a civil war, so we have nothing to offer them but civil war -- why don’t others see this?,” what are we, at this moment in time, supposed to think? Is Elena really all that wise? Or is this a wink to the hindsight-blessed reader, a chance to congratulate ourselves on our own righteous prescience? Just as constant references to celebrities of the moment can eventually date a book like this one, so might pinning arguments to the messy, still evolving context of Iraq. Smiley’s explorations of cultural conflict, national identity, personal sacrifice and the politics of war are at their most resonant when her characters look up from the March 2003 headlines to see the bigger picture.

But back to the storytelling. These folks aren’t just storytellers, they’re film-industry insiders (or sleeping with one), and their primary topic is film. If Iraq is analogous to the Black Death, then Hollywood stands for both money and God. It makes sense for Max or Zoe or Stoney to perceive the world through a cinematic lens, but does every character have to? Speeches beginning along the lines of “Remember that movie ... ?” grow repetitive. The behind-the-scenes anecdotes are sometimes entertaining, but too many bits simply sound like Hollywood stories and spoofs and satires we’re already familiar with. Irony-free lines such as “It’s got great buzz.... Kind of ‘The Sixth Sense’ meets ‘Fort Apache -- The Bronx’ with a touch of ‘Kundun’ ” could be straight out of Michael Tolkin’s “The Player.” Zoe’s rumination on the good manners of L.A. drivers at a four-way intersection evokes Steve Martin’s “L.A. Story.” There’s the old observation about Tony Curtis (born “nice Jewish boy” Bernie Schwartz) ill fitting his costume-drama roles. Even the name “Max” recalls Tony Roberts’ Hollywood slickster-style of address in “Annie Hall.”

Perhaps Smiley is making a comment on the power of film in contouring our collective psyches, but even if insiders do cover this fusty material with other insiders, a little less might have offered a little more. *