Ten Days in the Hills

Suzanne Toren delivers magnificently in this fascinating but difficult narration task, involving 10 people in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills who tell their personal stories over a ten-day period. The book is Smiley's version of Boccaccio's DECAMERON, and her topics are movies, the Iraq War, and sex, lots of sex. When no one is telling a story, the action is almost always sexual. Toren gives each of the 10 characters, plus a covey of six Russians who make cameo appearances, a distinct, immediately recognizable voice. And she carries them successfully through conversations and monologues. Her varied pacing keeps the monologues moving, never letting the listener's interest wane. Toren's one-woman show is a winner. R.E.K. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

Starred review from December 4, 2006
Smiley (A Thousand Acres
) goes Hollywood in this scintillating tale of an extended Decameron
-esque L.A. house party. Gathering at the home of washed-up director Max the morning after the 2003 Academy Awards are his Iraq-obsessed girlfriend, Elena; his movie-diva ex-wife Zoe and her yoga instructor–cum–therapist–cum– boyfriend Paul; Max's insufferably PC daughter, Isabel, and his feckless agent, Stoney, who are conducting a secret affair; Zoe's oracular mother, Delphine; and Max's boyhood friend and token Republican irritant Charlie. They watch movies, negotiate their clashing diets and health regimens, indulge in a roundelay of lasciviously detailed sexual encounters and, most of all, talk—holding absurd, meandering, beguiling conversation about movies, Hollywood, relationships, the war and the state of the world. Through it all, they compulsively reimagine daily life as art: Max dreams of making My Lovemaking with Elena
, an all-nude, sexually explicit indie talk-fest inspired by My Dinner with Andre
, but Stoney wants him to remake the Cossack epic Taras Bulba
. Smiley delivers a delightful, subtly observant sendup of Tinseltown folly, yet she treats her characters, their concern with compelling surfaces and their perpetual quest to capture reality through artifice, with warmth and seriousness. In their shallowness, she finds a kind of profundity.