It's Hollywood, so yes, there's a lot of sex

Today is Oscar Sunday. Your attitude to this annual schlock-fest may already be shaping your answer to the next question: do you want to spend 10 days (or their fictional equivalent of 449 densely packed pages) trapped at Jane Smiley's Hollywood house-party? Would it help if I told you it was a brilliantly witty reworking of Boccaccio's Decameron?

The cast looks like this: a washed-up movie-director and his latest lover, his useless agent (secretly getting it on with the director's daughter), his ex-wife and her flakey New Age guru, his ex-mother-in-law and her garrulous best friend, his lover's son (a would-be college dropout), and his oldest buddy (fleeing marital breakdown in New Jersey). The story starts with a hangover, in Hollywood on Oscar Monday, 2003. The party's over, the Iraq war has begun. Max, the creatively blocked movie mogul, is in bed with Elena, a borderline obsessive-compulsive who writes self-help manuals. They're attempting intercourse but they're both a little preoccupied: Max is mentally shooting a low-budget feature called My Lovemaking with Elena (a pornographic homage to My Dinner with Andre); Elena is fretting about geopolitics. Then they get up and realise that the house is unexpectedly full of all the significant entries in Max's address book, all simultaneously taking a holiday from reality.

Put like that, it sounds unbearable. So why isn't it? A quick look at her choice of prefatory quotes gives some clues: one from Proust, one from Boccaccio, one about Gogol. Boccaccio is the most immediately obvious influence, providing the book's structural frame: the Decameron's characters retreat into the hills to escape the Black Death, to tell stories - many of them erotic. Smiley's people do the same. They tell their best anecdotes, their party pieces, their childhood traumas, memories, urban myths. They sit down and watch old movies, many of which pertain to current crises (six pages, for example, are devoted to a discussion of Val Guest's 1961 film, The Day the Earth Caught Fire), or they argue about making new ones. Proust makes his presence felt, too, through Smiley's intensely imagined, forensic attention to detail - the tendons flexing in a hand, the veins visible on a wrist - as well as to past lives; her love of gossip (as Elena says, gossip is perennial and universal); and the book's sprawling length. And Gogol, author of the novel Taras Bulba, an anti-Semitic tale of Cossacks, bloodlust and the Ukraine, provides the story that will rebuild Max's career, at least according to Stoney (the feckless agent), who is trying to persuade Max to do a remake at the behest of some dubious Russian moneymen.

So what actually happens in these Ten Days? Well, there's a lot of sex. And (this being Hollywood), the sex is mostly steamy, orgasmic stuff with very little of the real-world variety intruding. It's sometimes so blow-by-blow that it makes Susan Minot's Rapture (a 100-page novella about one act of fellatio) look pretty economic by comparison. But, at the heart of it, are the arguments: Elena's diatribes on the Iraq war, old buddy Charlie's feeble (one-man) Republican defence, Max's daughter Isabel's onslaught against neglectful mother, Zoe... An exact mirror, in fact, of Max's own proposed movie project, My Lovemaking with Elena, which will, he says, be "mostly talk". The Russian moneymen are disappointed: "'You are promising sex and only giving talk? This also sounds like Chekhov to me,' said Al. 'Intellectuals will be interested in this movie, but I don't see that it has broad appeal."

But does Smiley's novel? Viewed with detachment, the insertion of long rants against the war (which bear strong comparisons with Smiley's own postings to "Huffpo", the liberal Huffington Post website on which she's a regular blogger) might be seen as an impediment to the pace of a novel. But it's the conversational, free- flowing feel of the book that makes it so avidly consumable. As Smiley devotees will know, she immerses author and reader completely in whatever world she's dissecting, whether it's horse-racing, estate agency or movie-making. And this one is the perfect union of writer and subject: it's Proust meets Harold Robbins, Jackie Collins with a political edge. Can you get broader, or better, than that?

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