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ane Smiley's latest novel, Ten Days in the Hills, is creating waves in the world of literary criticism the way Britney's shaved head seems to be doing everywhere else. The cause? Graphic sex, of course. John Updike wrote that Smiley has "set a new mark for explicitness in a work of non-pornographic intent." And New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani found the "pages and pages of R-rated (sometimes X-rated) accounts of sexual shenanigans" too much to bear.



Smiley, the author of eleven other novels, including the 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winner A Thousand Acres, tells the story of ten people waiting out the beginning of the Iraq War in two mansions in the Hollywood Hills. The characters — which include a famous aging director named Max, his legendarily beautiful ex-wife Zoe, and their children, friends and lovers — sit around talking about the war, worrying about the world, watching movies and screwing.


But according to Smiley, all the sex is just a way of talking about love. "My theory of love includes a lot of sex. And yes, it's pleasurable and enjoyable and interesting and deeply communicative sex." Hooksexup spoke to Smiley about what it means to "make love" in a novel, and why she's glad she's not Angelina Jolie. — Joey Rubin

You've never lived in Hollywood, and you're not a Hollywood insider or even a failed screenwriter. Why set this novel there?

Well, Hollywood is the setting and the characters have Hollywood connections, but the time is the beginning of the Iraq War and I see them equally as subjects of the book.

One thing I learned in reading this novel is that Hollywood people who are anxious about war have lots of sex.

If they're lucky! When these dangerous events enter our consciousness, one of the first things we do is look around and say, "Who's going to hold my hand through this?" And so in some sense the characters in the novel happen to be Hollywood people who are going through the same experience that the rest of us go through during those periods of terror and anxiety.

Which is having sex and then talking about it?

My partner and I went to a movie called Meet Joe Black, which wasn't a movie I liked, but it was a movie he liked. But one of the things that the movie proposed was that Brad Pitt and that girl who I can't remember now found true love. And this is demonstrated in the sex scenes. And I remember going out of the movie and thinking, "That's not love as I know it." And asking myself, "How would I demonstrate my theory of true love?" And so in some sense that was the inspiration for this novel: what kind of movie would I make to demonstrate my theory of true love?

And to talk about making love?

Here's what I say to myself as a writer: I want these people to be convincingly in love. What do I think love is? Well, I think love for a lot of people is deeply sexual. And that is something I want to show, to demonstrate.

Sex between people of all ages and at all stages of life.

Right. I mean, I basically conceived of the novel through the sexual relationship between Max and his girlfriend Elena, who, I should mention, are fifty-nine and fifty. They couldn't be the only ones having sex. There had to be some young people having sex too. And pretty soon, there's a lot of sex in the book, and the old people can't be left out. Cassie reminisces, not about her own sex life, but about her alleged friendship with Henry Miller. And not everybody can be in a relationship, so we have the twenty-year-old Simon. And so suddenly we have sex all over the place.

When you decided to write about sex so explicitly, did you anticipate the media reaction?

I might have early on, but then I just got so interested in the novel that I stopped anticipating anything. I was busy reacting to it myself. I don't normally think in terms of reactions, of other readers' reactions. I just write what I enjoy.

But the sex is pretty graphic. Did you consciously think to yourself, And now I'll get explicit, and now I'll mention labia . . . ?

There is nothing special about the sex. It's organic to the book. It's no more special than any other interaction the characters have. I don't think every headline would be about all the sex in this book if I were a guy. I drew only on my experience. I wrote only about sex as I know it. My take on sex and the way I write about it is not the way a guy would. It's not sex for the sake of sex. It's not sex as an athletic activity. It's sex in the context of a relationship. So here I am: I'm a woman, I'm old, I'm writing about sex in the context of a relationship. It's a whole generation after Dr. Ruth. And yet it's still a matter of curiosity to people that I would do that. That's the interesting thing.

What interests you about writing about sex?

Love.

And how they relate?

You know, this book is not about sex, this book is about love. Most of the characters in the book who are having sex profess to be in love with one another. So the book is really about sex as an aspect of love. Sometimes it's a major aspect, sometimes it's a troubled aspect. It's not about the mechanics.

For someone like me, it's silly to not want to be inside the minds of your characters as they're making love. There was a headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer, "Sex to the Max." That headline sells papers. "Making Love to the Max" doesn't sell papers. See what I mean? So don't be seduced by what the newspapers say; ask yourself what's in the book.

Yeah, I didn't register the explicitness of the sex when I read it because it seemed very organic to the story.

I was interested in [the characters'] different psyches. I knew they were going to have sex because they loved each other. And to be perfectly honest, it's a book that has a lot of conversations. What if I had ten days of conversation and there was no sex? How dull is that? So, they can do several things when they're all bunkered down together: they can eat, they can talk, they can watch movies, they can walk around, they can dive into the swimming pool and they can have sex. So let's do all of them.

But here's something else to keep in mind, because this book is about the movies. When we go to the movies we see images of people we know are not ourselves, doing things. That's why it's always strange to take a child to the movies and all of a sudden have a sex scene appear on the screen. Because he or she is looking at something that you, the parent, may know that the child has never seen before. And then you're really up a creek. I remember that happening with some Leonardo DiCaprio movie I took a thirteen year old to. It had kids in it so I thought it was a kid movie. They started having sex and I just — whoops! — put my hands over her eyes.

But if you're reading a novel and a sex scene comes up, and you've never seen [sex], then you can't picture it at all. It's like when I was a kid and I picked up Lady Chatterley's Lover — it made no sense to me. A novel is different from a movie because you're drawing on your own experiences to fill in the images. You could read the novel aloud to a four year old and the four year old wouldn't know what you're talking about. So the way the press has emphasized the sex has been really funny. "Here's this old lady writing so much about sex." You know, once I was an old lady writing so much about horses, and the horse people loved that. But that didn't get as many headlines.

You've said that this whole project began as an idea for a film.

Yes, but then I thought more in terms of practicalities. And probably the first challenge was, would anybody go see a movie where the two actors having sex were in their fifties? Sure, they'd go see the movie if the man was in his fifties. They always do. But the usual thing in Hollywood is for the woman to be in her thirties or her twenties if the man is in his fifties. I want to make a certain type of movie that you almost never see: a romantic unmarried couple in which the woman is about the same age as the man, and they're both in their fifties. And that's when the novelist's ears perk up.

You get your characters to talk about the unfilmable movie.

Right.

Of all the different relationships covered in the novel — casual, long-term, therapeutic — I wondered why none of the characters were married.

I think I didn't have them be married because I wanted their relationships to be fluid. Marriage has a real gravity. When you introduce a marriage into a novel, it's like a black hole — all other relationships are sucked into that. As soon as you have a marriage, and then the kids of the marriage, then we're in Freudland.

At one point in your novel one of Max's potential financial backers says, "America became great because Americans used the movies to talk to themselves about who they were." Do you think this is true?

I think it's been true all along, but it's changed shape over the course of Hollywood. One of the things that people used to do — mostly women, but maybe men too — was to see themselves as certain Hollywood types. My mother saw herself as an Ingrid Bergman, for instance. That came from going to the movies every week or so, and feeling a kinship with the Hollywood actors. I don't think that's so common anymore. Who sees themselves as Angelina Jolie? Nobody. Who would dare? She's just bigger than life. It's just not how it works anymore. But we consume them in a different way. We want to know everything about them. We want to see their babies. The consumption remains enormous, but it nature has changed.

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