Ten Days in the Hills | Jane Smiley | Talks at Google

Thanks for coming. I just had a great meal, so I'm in a really good mood and I missed out on all the really good exotic food. I couldn't believe it. I went through like the main branch, but there were all these other branches that, that led in all these other directions. I thought it was great. We have about 45 minutes. Is that what you said? Okay, so I'll read a little bit and then we can do a little bit of question and answer. First of all though, in honor of the verdict in the Libby trial, I would like to show you my Dick Cheney memorial T shirt. And obviously I'm not referring to you guys. So one more victory in the ultimate battle to do away with these guys. So I'm going to read a little bit from 10 days in the hills. This is day five. The characters. This is from the point of view of Isabel, who is a 23 year old graduate of UC Santa Cruz. It's her father who owns the house and who is a Hollywood director. And she's lying out on the chaise lounge late at night next to the pool with her friend Stoney, who is a movie agent, but he's kind of hapless. He's not a tremendously successful movie agent. He is, however, Max's movie agent. And unbeknownst to the father, Stoney and Isabel have been sleeping together off and on since she was about 16 or 17 and he was 196% of her age, which was about 30. So now, anyway, they are lying out by the pool. Stoney and Isabel were lying on chaises at the far edge of the pool, under the shadow of the hillside in the dark. Isabel suspected that it was way after midnight. Already even the pool light was out and the water was black and invisible. If she had been making the movie of this conversation, Isabel thought she would have stippled in some stars in the calm liquid surface of the pool and had them dimly reflect the stars in the sky. She said, stoney, do you think that when you're in a hole the way we are here, you can see more stars or is that just an illusion? I have no idea. It was cool and she was lying on a blanket covered with towels. Their edges and corners fluttered just a little bit. It had been an odd day, hot and windy. Now she could feel the wind eddy about. The ridgeline to the west protected them from direct exposure. Even so, she had more of a sense than usual of something dangerous at out and about. Only the wind, but still. So she had a towel wrapped around her head. It Was warm and comforting to her to be so cocooned. Stoney said, I met with those Russians this morning. They told a story. I've been thinking about it all day. Now, the Russians are some mysterious guys who are trying to get Max to make a movie of the book Taras Bulba, which was made into a movie in the early 1960s. But they want to make an authentic version of Taras Bulba. What was it? Well, they're staying at the Beverly Wilshire, so we were sitting in the restaurant there. Did I tell you before that their names are Mike, Al and Sergey? Mike is the boss. When he got up to go buy some cigars, Al. Al leaned across the table to Sergei and said, you know how Mike got married? Sergei shakes his head, and Al glances at me and says, you know, Mike is from Kazan, which is almost not Russia. He lives in Moscow now, but he went back to his home district when he was ready to get married and fell for this girl, Adana. But she was determined to finish at the university and have a career, so she turned him down and ran off and hid for him. He tried to set up a deal with her parents, but she still wouldn't have it. So one day, Mike is out wandering in the countryside, trying to figure out what to do about Adonis. Should he forget her? Should he try something else? Why is she such a cold bitch? And he hears the sound of dogs barking and howling, and he turns around and here comes a naked girl. The dogs are big wolfhound types, and they're chasing her. Behind them is a man on a horse with a gun. The dogs run her down and grab her, and the guy jumps off his horse and goes after her with his gun. Mike has a gun, too, like he always does. So he steps in among the dogs and shoots one and grabs the girl. She's got blood pouring from her belly and her breasts. So Mike holds him off, but thinking that the guy looks familiar. And then the guy says, mike, it's not your business. But Mike won't let him near her. She's crying. One of the dogs is dead. Mike figures it's going to be a shootout, which isn't so uncommon in Kazan. But the guy says that he's Mike's uncle Nikolai, and that this is Masha that he is in love with. Now, Mike's uncle is dead, so he figures the guy is lying, so he threatens to shoot the other dog. The uncle says that, yes, he did die, but unbeknownst to the family, he died by his own hand, out of love for the girl. After he died, the girl, Masha, laughed and gloated at his funeral. But then Masha died of a mysterious illness. Stoney sat up, leaned toward her, and whispered. After her death, the two of them were sent to hell and were cursed. And their curse is once a week, just at sunset on Friday, he chases her with the dogs right to this spot. The dogs catch her and he shoots her. Isabel said, stoney, do you believe everything you hear? And suddenly, as the uncle finishes telling the story, the dead dog leaps up and sinks his teeth into the girl's ass and she screams. Mike steps back in surprise. The uncle shoots the girl in the head, pulls out a knife, slits her open, pulls out her heart, which is small and hard, and throws it to the dogs, who gobble it down. Then all of them, dogs, horse, uncle, and girl, vanish. She sat back out of her gaze, and Isabel looked up at the stars again. She said, this is a ghost story, right? They said it really happened. Ugh, said Isabel. It was true. She thought that honoring the integrity of other people's cultures was always harder than you thought it was going to be. The next week, according to Al, Mike talked Adonna and her family into going with them and his family out to this spot spot. Pretty soon they're ensconced under some trees and here comes the horse, the uncle, the girl, and the dogs. She's naked and running and screaming and as live and palpable as you or me. And the horse is churning up dust and the dogs are barking and baying right in front of the spectators. They leap on her and bring her down and begin tearing her apart. Nikolai jumps off his horse and wades into the melee and does the same thing as the week before. He shoots her in the head so that her brains spat her all over a nearby tree. And then he rips her open, tears out her little heart, throws it to the dogs, and they all disappear into thin air. Adonna's father runs over to the tree and sees that the bark is clean. No blood, no hoof prints, no sign of a bullet. Well, the onlookers are really shook by this. It's 1992 after all, and all the old folks went to Soviet era schools and nothing about this sort of thing was ever covered in the curriculum. They do believe in curses, though. So the mother and the father take the daughter aside and they have a long family conference right there, and Mike starts looking a little better to her. Everyone decides in the end that the marriage could be good or bad, but a curse is Worse. And so they have a wedding and Mike brings Adana back to Moscow, and now she works for Itar Tass. And they have a couple of kids. They told you this with a straight face? Stoney nodded. This girl is my age. Well, 30, actually. Isabel shivered, looked up at the stars, and listened for the low whoosh of cars on the unseen 405. They told you this sitting in the restaurant at the Beverly Wilshire? Yeah. Did Masha feel the pain? I gather that's what a curse is. You have to feel the pain, I guess. Now Isabel could feel the darkness form a second layer of her cocoon. It gathered around her, pressing quietly against her. It was LA darkness, reassuring after all. Darkness that wafted around places like the Beverly Wilshire and Rodeo Drive and Sunset, up Beverly Glen to Mulholland, along the pch, feathered by the whiteness of the breaking surf. Darkness in LA wasn't all that dark in Isabel's experience, and was anyway always broken up and scattered by light. It sounded like darkness in Russia was deeper and more dangerous. Adonna and Masha. She shivered. He said the way the family interpreted the curse was that the girl returned evil for good. When the guy gave her his love, she not only spurned him, she mocked him. So she had no right to her own thoughts and feelings. Basically, for her to have her own thoughts and feelings is a danger to the entire town, as that. Is that what they were saying? Basically, yeah. So what does this have to do with my father? Stoney said, nothing. Except that Mike's the boss and the one with the money. He came back without any cigars and said he didn't like what they had. But I kept wondering if they set me up with this story to communicate something. Well, that sounds very godfatherish, I admit that. But you know what they say about movie critics. What? After they've seen three movies a day for a year, they hardly dare to go down the basement steps anymore. Isabel snuggled down into her cocoon and pulled her turban over her eyes so that she couldn't see anything. But she knew Stoney was looking at her, so she smiled. She heard him go on. I mean, it's not like threats of intimidation are unheard of in Hollywood. Bugsy Siegel, Frank Sinatra, William Randolph Hearst, George Raft and all that. I mean, you know who Anthony Pellicano is, right? It's still happening. If Jerry were alive, he would know how to talk to them. What did you say? I said I'd schedule a meeting. Then I came out onto Rodeo Drive and it was so Windy that the trees were cracking. It was kind of apocalyptic. Your dad was a tough guy, wasn't he, Jerry? This is Stoney's dad, who's died about a year before. Jerry had been a fixture in Isabel's life, but she had never experienced him at all the way Stoney had. No doubt, because she was a girl, Jerry treated all females the same way. He complimented their clothes and hair, brought presents, asked him jovially if they had any boyfriends, and then more or less ignored him. Well, said Stonie. Compared to whom? Compared to De Niro in the Godfather Part 2? Did he do what he had to do when he was a kid? Compared to Pacino in the Godfather Part iii? Did he allow the deaths of longtime friends and associates because they had betrayed the code or gotten in the way? I sincerely doubt it. But he was fearless in some ways. He was so intent on the goal that his mind didn't take in threats the way mine does. A threat for Jerry was just another factor to be considered while he was deciding his strategy. In the end, people always did what Jerry wanted them to do. Even when he had that brain tumor, he was still like the Terminator. You just couldn't stop him. He was tough like that. Isabelle pushed up her towel and then turned her head and looked at Stoney. Her eyes were so adjusted to the dark now that she could see him perfectly. To all appearances, she thought he was just talking with Stoney. Just talking inevitably seemed to circle around to Jerry. All the same, she didn't like the idea of her father being vulnerable to these Russian guys, whoever they were. With only Stoney as protection. She said hopefully, I guess my dad is a pretty tough negotiator. Max isn't a negotiator at all. That's his problem. What do you mean? Well, if he really wants to do something, then he'll give up anything in order to do it. I mean, when he made Southern Pacific. Remember that one? Oh, with Dennis Quaid. I love that one. Yeah, well, you and one movie reviewer, I think. Anyway, Max loved that script, and he wanted to work with that cinematographer. And he had Dennis all fired up. And Jerry had to practically lock him in the closet to keep. Keep him from giving everything away. He would have done it for pbs. He would have spent his own money to do it. He thought that his enthusiasm meant something good. But all it meant to the studio was that they could roll right over him. But if they get it cheap, then the project doesn't mean anything to them. That's the way their minds Work. And Max should have known that if you don't play hard to get in this town, then nothing about your project has any value. But if Max is not interested in a project, he just says no, and then he gets pissed when they keep after him. No means no, said Isabel. I can't tell you how many times I heard that over the years. Well, in this business, no means call me later and come up with more money. He should know that by now. Your mom is a great negotiator. She's legendary. You're kidding. Nope. You know, that way she has of reacting to what you say with something that's just a little out of left field and then you laugh, but you aren't sure she was really making a joke. Yes, it's because she isn't really listening. Well, I don't know why it is, but it's always disarming because all the guys in the room are thinking about one thing and she isn't thinking about that thing. And then she seems truly not to care about any project more than any other. They think they have to make her care, and of course they think the way to do that is money and perks and points and stuff, but she doesn't really seem to care about that either, so they offer more. Maybe she's a great actress in those negotiations, but in fact I think she really doesn't care. I don't know what she does care about, said Isabel, and saying it felt like a confession. I don't know who she cares about. There were several things she could add, Isabel thought, but she resisted doing so. Stoney said, are we going to talk about her failures as a mother? We could, but I don't know. I know what you think, and I know what you think. How about you tell me what I think and I'll tell you what you think, and then we'll see if we still agree with ourselves. Isabel sniffed, knowing he was making fun of her, but yet, yes, she did deserve to be made fun of, at least a little. So she said, you think she's afraid of me, and just because whenever she calls me or talks to me, I act snotty, she gets more afraid of me and less interested, less likely, less likely to make an effort. Stoney said, you think that she's a selfish narcissist who should take more of an interest in others who are not unsuitable men, that there has actually only been one suitable man. That would be Max, and in the end pleasing him meant fulfilling her obligations to you and Delphine, and that was the Deal killer for her. Isabel looked at the stars again for a moment, then wiggled around in her cocoon, which suddenly felt too tight. She said, I guess we understand each other. If you say so. Our analysis doesn't go very deep. No, I don't think it does. So. I really need a napkin. Is there a. I'll just go get one. Okay, thanks. So there's a lot more. And this book, which you may know or may not know, was inspired by one of my favorite books, which is a book by Giovanni Boccaccio called the Decameron, which was written in. Thank you very much. Pardon? Yes, thank you. No, no, it was a napkin. And Boccaccio wrote the Decameron in 1350, right in the middle of the Black Death. And it's about 10, I think, young people, probably in their early 20s, members of the wealthy classes, who meet one day in church and decide they just have to get out of town for a break. And so they do, and they go up into the Tuscan hills. They find themselves a castle. I think of it as a kind of the Ritz Carlton. And they go up there and they. They tell stories for 10 days. They have a theme for the day, and each person tells a story. And so each person tells 10 stories over the 10 days. And in the course of doing that, I think from our perspective, when we look back on the Black Death, which is certainly one of the most horrendous events in history, in historical memory at least, what they do is they recreate the world even as it's falling apart. And that's what struck me when I was reading the Decameron in 2001, that if they could be telling stories and jokes and having discussions about sex and erotica and other moral dilemmas in the midst of the Black Death, then we could do the same in our day. And so I decided. I'd been wanting to write a book about Hollywood, and I decided that I was going to set it at the beginning of the Iraq War and do what I thought. Do what? Say, for future potential readers what Boccaccio had done for me, which was to give me a picture of the world that he lived in in 1350, at a moment when it seemed to me that the world pivoted from being medieval to being proto modern or early Renaissance. And so I look around and I see that the world we're in seems to be in a grave state of intense and dangerous change. And so I wanted to write a book in which people could look and see a portrait of the world that we see around us with people and landscapes and movies and works of art and a war off stage. And so that's essentially what this book is. But because Boccaccio is very funny, and the books and the stories that he tells are not always, but often humorous, I decided that I would emulate him in that way, too. And I would attempt to make it humorous and bawdy and lively and funny and not dour. Dour and depressing. So that's the point of this book, and I hope that you will enjoy it. I know they have copies for anyone who wants them, and I'm willing to answer any questions. I love to answer questions, actually, so say something. Your turn. Yes, She wants me to talk a little about the process of character development. Most novelists in their early period, their first few books, they look around and they pick their relatives and their friends, and they thinly disguise them, and then they put them. You know, Aunt Jane becomes a murderer or something like that, which you always knew she could be. But as you continue to write books, you don't need to use your relatives and your friends anymore. In fact, they become a kind of burden on you because your characters almost start to take shape without you having to work at it. Here's the situation. Here's the kind of person that belongs in the situation. Here is how tall he is. Here are some of his particular characteristics. And suddenly he starts to walk around. Now, there have been people over the years that I said, oh, so and so should be in a book that's an interesting person. But inevitably, that person becomes different as he enters the book and as you begin to inhabit him. One of my favorite things that happens in a book is that you have some character who's usually the antagonist or somebody that you're not sympathetic with, and you begin empathizing with that person. Not necessarily sympathizing with them, but seeing the world through their point of view. And quite often, as in the work of Charles Dickens, those are your liveliest characters, because those are the ones you've had to use the most imagination to enter. And because you do that in a kind of detailed way, you become fond of them. You wouldn't be friends with them. You wouldn't ever agree with them on the things that they. The way they spend their life. And yet they remain in your inner life as some of the characters that you were most interested in or most fond of. In this particular book, I knew there were going to be five men and five women. I knew that they were going to be related to one another, at least tangentially. I had people in mind that they could be like. But then as soon as they started walking and talking in the book, they ceased being like any of those people and came to be just like themselves. One of the great paradoxes may be in a novel is that any given character both develops and reveals himself or herself as the book progresses. To the reader, the character is being revealed, but in the mind of the author the character is being developed. But it comes out basically to the same thing. And it's somewhat mysterious and intuitive process. Yeah, okay. Anybody speak up?

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the relationship between the fiction and politics in this book.

Okay.

You do a really good job of giving us a window into these characters lives. I think one reviewer called it voyeuristic. You do so without passing judgment on them. And I was wondering if you could talk about the process of depersonalizing your fiction writing, taking yourself away from it. Even as someone who holds such strong.

Yeah, well, a lot of authors have held strong political views. The question is always how do your political views fit into the form of the novel? The novel always demands this quality of empathy or else the character, a character that you don't empathize with is dead on the page, just there it goes. Because it's one sided and because all it is is a mouthpiece for the author's ideas. So as a novelist, you might have your novelist hat and you might have your polemicist's hat. How you negotiate between the two really tells what's important to you. If you're really a novelist at heart rather than a polemicist like me, then you're willing to give up those ideas that you had temporarily in order to maintain the integrity of the novel. But this is because the novel is a naturally political art form in the fact that it always has a protagonist who's more or less in conflict with the group. And the protagonist is developed and the group is developed and the. And how they relate to one another. And the outcome of the plot is actually a political theory always in Zola or Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or John Updike or anybody, then the novelist always has that temptation to break out of the empathetic voice of the novel, the empathetic system of the novel, and try and get his point across. And we see that in novels of the 1920s. A good example is one you probably have never read and lucky you, but it's pretty good anyway. It's called the Sleepwalkers by Hermann Brock, a German novelist, and the way he decided to get his points across, which had to do with the development of. Of German culture, or he would have said the disintegration of German culture from the 19th century into the 20th century, was to break out of his form and use essays and poetry and play like forms to somehow make his point all that much more determined. I mean, all that much more clear for the reader to grasp. It was a way of forcing his polemical point on the reader. But in fact, the novel is always capable of being thrown away. The reader always has to have the freedom of saying, eh, I don't like this. This isn't any good. The novel is an immovable object. It's not an irresistible force. And when the novelist is a polemicist, he is trying to take the immovable object and make it into an irresistible force. And he's always going to fail. So at least that's my view. The political nature of the novel is free. The political nature of the novel is to underline, underscore, and assert that the novelist is free to write about what he or she wants. And the reader is free to read it or not to take it in, to entertain those thoughts. And any novel that attempts or has attempted in the past, to kind of abridge the reader's freedom, the reader will reject. The reader will say, meh, I don't like that. I'm not going to read it. And then the novel, the other odd thing about the novel is that this isn't a novel. It's only a novel when I'm reading it. When I close it, it's a book. It has no being. It only has a being as a novel when I'm entertaining it in my mind, when I'm experiencing the reading of it. And so if I, the author, offend you, the reader, my novel, you close my book, and my novel ceases to exist. So the novel in general has always worked by luring, alluring, drawing the reader in, rather than by insisting. So that's one of the things I love about the novel, and that's what I think makes it an inherently liberal, political art object in a way that other, more spectacular art objects are not. So another question. Yes. Your previous work involved reading many novels and then synthesizing into 13 ways of looking at them to that effect, your writing of this new novel. Oh, yes. One of the things that happened was, of course, that I read the Decameron in order to write that book, or rather the Decameron was part of the reason that I wrote that book. But the other thing I noticed in reading all those hundred novels and it wasn't 100 Danielle Steele books, it was Moby Dick and Ulysses and, and the Expedition of Humphrey Clinker by Tobias Smollett and Roxanna by Daniel Defoe and Uncle Tom's Cabin and any number of. Some of them quite dense and some of them not very dense, but various novels. And the thing I noticed was that I didn't really care if it was a page turner or not. You know, I had thought up until I wrote, up until I read all those books that, you know, you just in order to retain your reader, you had to be a page turner. And I discovered that there are a lot of novels in the history of the novel that aren't page turners and that you can enjoy anyway. And there's a reason for that. The novel owes its, let's say it carries the DNA of many forms, many previous narrative forms. And one of them is travel writing. Well, travel writing is never a page turner. Travel writing is about meandering from place to place and enjoying the ride. Another one is. Historical analysis. Well, that's not a page turner either because you're more interested in divining what the analysis is is than you are in seeing what happened. You know, it happened because it's history. That's what happened. You're more interested in why it happened. So then, now in 13 ways I drew a clock and I put all the. At every part of the clock, at every number on the clock. I put something that the novel owes its being to some form. Down here is the tail. The tail is always a page turn turner. What I read you the ghost story, that's essentially a tale. You just want to know what happened and you know, you're going this. The best thing that happened as a ghost story is for everybody to be sitting around going, you know, and then, you know, you're 13 and you know you were a success, you know, because you made them all gasp. But another part of the clock is gossip. Novels have, oh, a lot to gossip. And a lot of novels are really sophisticated and complex gossip. The novels of Henry James are really sophisticated and complex gossip. And we love them for that reason because they're analysis of the inner lives of people that we're talking about. So when I read all those novels, I discovered that I didn't have to get on with the plot all the time. I didn't have to strive to get a giant cons climax all the time, that there was room for something else. In my oeuvre. Maybe I wasn't going to make it my total oeuvre. Maybe I wasn't going to change my career and become James Joyce. But I could write a book in which we linger over things and is not very suspenseful. Though I have to say, one reader in New York stood up in the. I know. I guess it was Washington, D.C. she stood up and asked me. She told me she had to skip to the end just to see what happened. I said, you're kidding me. No. But she did. So different readers take their novels in different ways. And I thought that was really great. Anyone else in the back and then in the orange shirt? Well, you know, I usually only read current novelists when I'm reviewing a book. And so I just reviewed an interesting book by Rachel Kusk, who's an English novelist, and it was called Arlington Park. I thought that was really interesting. There was a really couple of interesting first novels last year. One was by a guy named d', Souza, but not Dinesh d', Souza, thank God. You can't even imagine that these two d' Souzas are related. It was called White man, and it was about a young man who goes to Africa as part of an NGO and lingers and lingers and lingers because he can't bear to come home. It's a wonderful novel. And then there was another one, first novel called White Ghost Girls, about a couple of girls in Hong Kong during the Vietnam War. Incredibly interesting short novel. I cannot remember the name of the author, but well worth reading. I like Garrison Keillor. You know, I like lots of, you know, if it crosses my desk, I'll read it. I have to say, at the moment I've been reading I love Zola. And at the moment I've been reading the Ladies paradise, which is a novel that he wrote about the first department store in Paris. And boy, it is Amazon.com virtual, you know, 19th century. Amazon.com all the arguments on both sides are exactly the same. The department store's sales structure and strategies are exactly the same. All the little shops that are. All the independent sellers around that are about to go out of business, all their resentment, I have to say, with Zola, plus a change, plus c' est la mem chevre, you know, and that's a really wonderful book. I'll probably blog about that book. You had a question? Yeah.

So it sounds like you.

Set out.

To specifically follow the camaraderie.

Yes.

When you did the Thousand Acres, was that the same choice or did that happen by writing and if it was by choice, what attracts you to kind of revisiting those?

Well, my. Yes, I did choose to rewrite King Lear in A Thousand Acres. And partly my aims used to be somewhat different than they are now. I was part of the first generation in America of women who didn't have to be weird in order to be novelists. We were like all those other girls years before. But when we went to college, we were told we could have careers. And so we sort of looked around and said, oh, what do I want to be? And I looked around and said, I want to be a novelist. But I didn't have to be childless. I didn't have to be manic depressive. I didn't have to be incredibly poor Lane, like George Eliot. I could just be a girl novelist. And I felt as a young woman that I had to do the thing that first generation novelists in any society, whether they're Russian or whether they're African or whatever, I had to take the novel and assimilate it. I had to take the culture and assimilate it and look at it from my point of view. And so that's what I wanted to do with King Lear. I wanted to take that play, which seemed to be very patriarchal to me, and I wanted to look at it from a female point of view. In this case, I'm now a generation older, and I no longer feel the same thing. But I do feel, having read all those novels, actually there's 130 of them, that they're still very current and interesting in and of themselves, and that I could use the model of the Decameron to do. To frame my own novel without really using the themes or the stories of the Decameron. Because it's a book of stories. It's not a novel in and of itself. So I have to say that I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a couple of weeks ago when I was in New York, and I went through an exhibition on Chinese scrolls from. I think the first one was from the 8th century, and the last one was from. Well, the last one was from our period. A lot of them were from the 13th century, 14th century. And what I was really struck by was what the later generations of scroll painters learned from the previous generation and how beautiful it was that they would add their own ideas, but that the depiction of the landscape in these journey paintings and scrolls was continuous. And I came away from that exhibition thinking it's not necessary to break our ties with. With the past, with previous art. We can learn something from it and do something with it and enter into the stream. In the terms of that, art, being absolutely new and fresh isn't the only thing you can be. So I guess that's my current theory. So you guys have to go back to work or not? Do you get to take a nap now? No. This was the nap period, right? This was the time you were supposed to be taking the nap. Well, it's great to be here. I'm sure you guys are having lots of fun. It sure looks like it. And thank you for having me.