A glorious new novel from the Pulitzer Prize winner: a big, smart, bawdy tale of love and war, sex and politics, friendship and betrayal?and the allure of the movies.
Knopf
February 2007
On Sale: February 13, 2007
464 pages ISBN: 1400040612 EAN: 9781400040612 Hardcover Add to Wish List
A glorious new novel from the Pulitzer Prize winner: a big,
smart, bawdy tale of love and war, sex and politics,
friendship and betrayal—and the allure of the movies. With
Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron as her model, Jane Smiley
takes us through ten transformative, unforgettable days in
the Hollywood hills.
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.
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