Books: A plague on all our houses

TRUST ME TO LOWER THE TONE. Ten minutes into my conversation with Jane Smiley we're talking about falling out of bed during sex. Well, I am. Actually, the characters in Smiley's novel Ten Days in the Hills fall out of a chair when their ardour grows overly animated.

We're talking sex because it's a feature in nearly every chapter of the novel, Smiley's take on Boccaccio's Decameron. But it's utterly free of the cringe-worthy luridness that regularly sees authors nominated for Bad Sex Awards. This is realistic and readable. What's her secret?

"The key is that the sex is nothing special. In the lives of most people, sex is funny," she says. "It's just another thing like eating dinner or talking to the kids. How do you put it that way and have it still be interesting? My answer is: you make it idiosyncratic. When Paul's having sex he's not having it in the same way that Zoe is, even though he's having it with Zoe. And when Elena is having sex she's not having it in the same way that Simon is. The reader isn't reading about sex, but about sex as a symptom of character."

That's a lot of names. Who are all these people fornicating like bunnies? Ten Days starts the morning after the 2003 Academy Awards, and mainly takes place chez Max, an award-winning Hollywood screenwriter. His lover, Elena, is there, and her son, Simon. Also on hand are Max's daughter, Isabel, his ex-wife Zoe and her boyfriend Paul; Zoe's mum (Max's ex-mother-in-law) Delphine, and her friend Cassie, and Max's agent, Stoney. It is, you might say, the very definition of a modern extended family.

Boccaccio's storytellers were hiding from the plague, Smiley's are hoping to wait out the second Iraq war. She won a Pulitzer for A Thousand Acres, a modern version of King Lear, so she's no stranger to what Hollywood calls an adaptation. Nor would she be the first writer inspired by Boccaccio: that list includes everyone from Chaucer, Marguerite of Navarre, and Shakespeare, to Fay Weldon and George Eliot. What was it about the Italian masterpiece that set her imaginative spark aflame?

The sheer richness of it, she says, and the way the stories echoed one another. Also, its resonance with the feeling in the States, post-9/11, and news stories at the time she was writing warning everyone about anthrax. The scent of apocalypse hung in the air.

"Boccaccio didn't know that the Black Death was a pivotal moment in European history, he just wrote about what was happening. Reading the Decameron I thought, look around us. Not so much that the Iraq war is analogous to the Black Death, except, perhaps, from the point of view of the Iraqis, in the degree of death and devastation, but it could be analogous from the point of view of what's next? In 500 years people might look back and say, OK, that's where history took a little turn. Not necessarily for the better, but a turn."

Another, rather different, influence was Brad Pitt's film Meet Joe Black. "The point was that Death, played by Brad Pitt, was going to be taught about love. But he was taught the same old bullshit! That I'm a handsome man and you're a beautiful woman and there are really tight close ups … Jack (her partner] liked that movie because he was moved by the relationship between Anthony Hopkins and his daughter. But I came out saying, 'Oh bullshit!' That got me thinking, what would be a movie about love in my view?"

What did she conclude, given that she once admitted it had taken her a long time to separate longing from love? "I learned a lot about love from breeding children and breeding horses. I learned that what you get is what you get. When the child comes, you didn't get to have a fantasy. You didn't get to put in your order. Here it is, and it's your job to love the child and act for it in a loving way. Once you have three or five, the way we have, you really see how each one is a system and your job is to understand and love the system.

"It's the same with horses. You may have thought you put your order in for that beautiful, marvellous temperament, but in fact the horse you bred is too small for you. Or the best-looking one has a screw loose. You learn that your loved one is given to you as a system."

Talking about love leads us to patience, and from there, to writing itself. Smiley explains that she learned patience with her craft a lot faster than with her relationships. "One of my first perceptions was that the book wasn't something I possess, it was something that I experienced. Every book had been created in me by the combination of experience and other books that I had read, and each book had its own integrity, that didn't have a lot to do with me necessarily. The ideas would start interacting with one another and moving along. I might like it or not, but that didn't mean it was bad or good."

This explains why she expressed surprise about readers enthusing that they love A Thousand Acres. She doesn't find those characters particularly congenial. "I took up King Lear thinking that I would master the material. Well, I didn't. Shakespeare didn't master the material. It's hard material and we both struggled and did the best we could with it. Before I wrote A Thousand Acres I saw Shakespeare as my older brother, a guy I could perfectly understand and go out and have a drink with. After the novel I saw him as a Renaissance man and totally alien from me. But I could really empathise with his struggle with that material. I could imagine how it felt to find this old play and say, 'I'm going to do this with it,' and then to be finished and go, 'Phew, I'm glad that's over'. That's kind of how I felt. At the same time I also perceived the material as being a kind of Ur-human experience coming to me through him, through whoever preceded him, from such a deep source in the human psyche that there is something quite intimidating in experiencing it.

"Most novelists write about the surface of things," she continues. "That's what novels are about. That's what people want to read. When there's this deep underground river of material, that's a little intimidating and scary. As I wrote other books I realised they had the same sort of partially malleable essence, so you could do things and make them better, but it was really very similar to riding a horse – you can train a horse to do stuff, but you can only make him do it in his way.

"Finally, you're interacting with your material, not manipulating it or shaping it. You interact until you're exhausted, and hope that you've produced something. You also have to know that you don't know what you've produced. The thing that you produced seems like one thing to you, but in the reader's mind it'll be totally different and you won't even be able to perceive what that is."

So if it's true that the material's just being channelled through you, why should we rate you? This elicits another wide smile. "Because I'm the volunteer. It took me a long time to realise I was doing anything intimidating. I thought I was walking down a path through a nice field, and then the fog blew away and I was standing on a bridge over an abyss! At the end of my life, looking back, when I think, 'God, I wrote all these books,' no-one will be more surprised than me. Who can say how that joined together, except to say, 'Well, I loved books and I volunteered to keep them going.' "



• Ten Days in the Hills is out in paperback from Faber and Faber, £8.99

Jane Smiley on the importance of birthdays

SMILEY'S last non-fiction book, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, starts with a little swoon about the quantity of great writers born between 23 and 30 September, including F Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, TS Eliot, William Blake and Miguel Cervantes. Smiley was born onthe 26th. Musically it's a fertile period, too, containing the births of George Gershwin, Ray Charles and Dimitri Shostakovich.

She writes: "I never hesitated to bring anyone who cared (or did not care) up to date on late September and early October (John Lennon) birthdays. It was rather like listing your horse's pedigree or your illustrious ancestors – not exactly a point of pride, but more a reassurance that deep down, the stuff was there, if only astrologically."

I'd have known you were a Libra from reading Ten Days, I say. It's a novel full of talk, which explores topics from every perspective, a trait typical of those born under the sign of the scales.

"It's so interesting you say that, because I assigned all those characters birthdays!," she replies. "I can't remember them now, but I know Max is a Gemini and Elena a Libra. All my children are Libras. You know what the motto of a Libra household is?"

Being a Libra myself, I nod. She supplies the punchline: "I know what you're thinking, and you're wrong!" – LR