Front row at the talkies

Little of which is put to good use in "Ten Days in the Hills," a long-winded, sexed-up Hollywood novel that seems as infatuated with its own volubility as it is exasperating. Smiley has borrowed from Boccaccio's "The Decameron" to jump-start her story, much the way she drew from "King Lear" for "A Thousand Acres"; Boccaccio's medieval classic is a set of interlocking tales from 10 refugees who have left the city to escape the Black Death. Here the contemporary scaffolding is a group of movie people and various hangers-on who hole up together at a couple of mansions in west LA in late March of 2003 -- the morning after the Academy Awards, and days after the US-led invasion of Iraq. Their reluctant host is a 58-year-old director named Max who's waning in every sense of the word -- he can't summon the requisite virility to make a movie or to please his lover, Elena. But he can still talk dirty, or talk dirty with metaphors (about war and power and movies, always movies), and so he does -- in one average-sized paragraph at the start of the novel, I counted 12 uses of the word "penetration." And let's face it, that's not even a very sexy word.