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Ten Days in the Hills
by Jane Smiley
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley's novel is the tale of love and war, sex and politics, friendship, betrayal and the allure of the movies focused over ten transformative days in the Hollywood hills.
Alfred A. Knopf, 464 pages
02/13/2007
$26.00
ISBN: 1400040612
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Booklist Donna Seaman
Smiley is regally omnipotent as she advocates for art, objects to war, and considers tricky questions of power and spirit, love and compassion. Archly sexy and brilliant. [15 Dec 2006, p.5]
PopMatters Margaria Fichtner
It is hard to know how much more anyone could ask of Smiley here. As Max’s house becomes squiggly with guests...it soon acquires the dynamic, claustrophobic lushness of an animated curio cabinet.
Publishers Weekly
Smiley delivers a delightful, subtly observant sendup of Tinseltown folly, yet she treats her characters...with warmth and seriousness. [4 Dec 2006, p.33]
The Independent Nicola Smyth
It's the conversational, free-flowing feel of the book that makes it so avidly consumable.
The Onion A.V. Club Donna Bowman
[Smiley] uses a novelist's imagination to extract telling details from the crazy-quilt of heightened emotion and fear that accompanied the [Iraq] war's onset.
Village Voice David Cotner
Smiley writes with cinematic verve and is nearly without equal when it comes to crystallizing the vagaries of a woman's inner narrative.
The Independent Hermione Eyre
Though there are passages here that might contend for the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award, [Ten Days in the Hills] would not be a worthy winner. Smiley always feels in control of the effect, whether to make us cringe, to titter or to sigh.
The Guardian Frank Cottrell Boyce
It's a testament to Smiley's skill that she makes such an unappealing project delightfully readable.
Sydney Morning Herald Malcolm Knox
Smiley's prose, muscular and vivid, always seems urgent. She never wastes a moment of the reader's time.
New York Review Of Books Diane Johnson
For this reader the amusement is with the discussion of current events, in the voice (common to all the characters) of the educated dissenter from Bush administration politics and the war in Iraq. Okay, it isn't William Pfaff or Tony Judt, but it brings current dilemmas under discussion.
Washington Post Chris Bohjalian
By the time the final credits were rolling, I was more enamored of Smiley's players than I was annoyed, and when the lights came up--excuse me, when I closed the book--I was grateful for the time I had spent with them in their sheltered and sumptuous little world.
Los Angeles Times Tara Ison
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.
New York Observer Mythili Rao
In "Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel", Ms. Smiley [wrote] candidly of career anxieties...Ten Days in the Hills is a sturdy counterargument to such worries. [12 Feb 2007, p.16]
The New Yorker John Updike
Ten Days in the Hills, unable to subdue its modern matter to a late-medieval courtliness and formality, strives for, and to an impressive extent achieves, a kindred richness.
San Francisco Chronicle June Sawyers
Not much happens, in the conventional sense at least, in this sprawling, languid, randy novel.
Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
Not a lot seems to happen, but amid the chat and canoodling, as in real life, you later perceive that tectonic shifts in the various relationships have quietly occurred throughout…Smiley's luxurious novel.
Houston Chronicle Charles Matthews
The satiric potential is obvious, and Smiley exploits it...[But] like the characters themselves, we're glad when the visit's over and we can get on with our lives.
USA Today Jocelyn McClurg
Jane Smiley has taken on Hollywood, and she has produced an extremely talky, overly intellectual, alternately brilliant and tedious work of fiction.
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Kathleen Byrne
Politics, like tea, needs to be properly steeped for it to be acceptable to the human palate...[Smiley] has presumably not heard this dictum, for in Ten Days in the Hills, her smart, funny, ultimately frustrating new novel, she proffers great gobbets of the war in Iraq and dishes them up raw.
The Spectator Olivia Glazebrook
Ten Days in the Hills is an easy read, but not such an accomplished book by any means.
Chicago Tribune Sarah Bird
As a narrative locomotive, ditherings and moral qualms of Hollywood liberals about the war?don't pack quite the punch of the Black Death.
Daily Telegraph Helen Brown
[Smiley] writes with beauty, wit, intelligence and political passion. But I wouldn't mind if there wasn't another novel like this for another 657 years.
Daily Telegraph Jane Shilling
[Smiley's] defining characteristic as a writer is that of an almost ruthlessly readable narrative drive. But not here.
The New York Times Book Review A. O. Scott
Three generations, all with time on their hands, sex on their brains and stories to tell--how could this fail to be, at the very least, wickedly entertaining? But fail it does.
Boston Globe Gail Caldwell
Ten Days in the Hills [is] a long-winded, sexed-up Hollywood novel that seems as infatuated with its own volubility as it is exasperating.
The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
Though the novel slowly gains in resonance as it rumbles along,...[Smiley's characters] are all monumentally self-conscious and self-absorbed, and their nattering on (and on and on) about themselves becomes tiresome in the extreme.
 The average user rating for this book is 5.5 (out of 10) based on 4 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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