She won a Pulitzer. Her newest book, according to her publisher, is “a big, smart, bawdy tale of love and war, sex and politics, friendship and betrayal—and the allure of the movies.” In other words, there are sex scenes in this book. Jane Smiley’s new release Ten Days in the Hills has some folks a bit edgy. She’s written sex scenes before, but this book is a bit different since the sex is central to the 10 characters’ lives here.

Michiko Kakutani (fellow Pulitizer Prize winner) gave the book a less-than-stellar review in the New York Times. To be fair, Kakutani isn’t known for loving too many books. In this one, she points out what she terms as “R-rated (sometimes X-rated) accounts of their sexual shenanigans.” She also uses words like “tiresome” to describe the characters…which is never good. The Los Angeles Times didn’t exactly feel the love on this one either.

In case you’re wondering, the publisher describes the plot this way:

It is the morning after the 2003 Academy Awards. Max—an Oscar-winning writer/director whose fame has waned—and his lover, Elena, luxuriate in bed, still groggy from last night’s red-carpet festivities. They are talking about movies, talking about love, and talking about the war in Iraq, recently begun. But soon their house will be full of guests, and guests like these demand attention. There is Max’s ex-wife, “the legendary Zoe Cunningham,” a dazzling half-Jamaican movie star, with her new lover, the enigmatic healer, Paul (fraudulent? enlightened?). Max’s agent, Stoney, a perhaps too easygoing version of his legendary agent father, can’t stay away, and neither can Zoe and Max’s daughter, Isabel, though she would prefer to maintain her hard-won independence. And of course there is the next-door neighbor, Cassie, who seems to know everyone’s secrets.

As they share their stories of Hollywood past and present, watch films in Max’s opulent screening room, gossip by the swimming pool, and tussle in the many bedrooms, the tension mounts, sparks fly, and Smiley delivers an exquisitely woven, virtuosic work—a Hollywood novel as only she could fashion it, told with bravura, rich with delightful characters, spiced with her signature wit. It is a joyful, sexy, and wondrously insightful pleasure.

Smiley, in an article in the Washington Post, says: “There’s a lot of problems with making [sex] central, and one of them is that it’s boring.”

On this I must agree. The sex scenes are my least favorite part of the writing experience. I find non-stop sex scenes kind of boring as a reader, too. Having them be integral and necessary is the key. Sounds as if the scenes are pretty integral to Smiley’s newest. It will be interesting to see what backlash, if any, Smiley feels for writing a book with such a strong sexual focus. Reviewers, readers and fellow authors outside the romance genre generally don’t look on this too favorably.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 22nd, 2007 at 10:46 am and is filed under About Authors, About Books, About Reviews, About Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.