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Ten Days in the Hills

Behind protective glass

Jane Smiley
Faber, 449pp, £16.99,

Olivia Glazebrook

Thursday, 1st March 2007

Jane Smiley suffered a period of writer’s block after 9/11. In the middle of writing a novel, Good Faith, she found herself unable to continue. It all suddenly seemed pointless. So, to inspire herself to complete her own, she read a hundred novels — one of which was Boccaccio’s The Decameron. After finishing Good Faith (published in 2003) she wrote a book about the hundred novels she had read (13 Ways of Looking at the Novel), and then she wrote this book, Ten Days in the Hills, which is a ‘reworking’ of The Decameron. Writer’s block can rarely have been put to such good use.

Finding herself unable to write was a shock for Smiley since inspiration had always come easily to her. In the introduction to 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel she writes, ‘I’d hardly ever doubted the significance of any idea that I’d had’, and continues, ‘The different forms I used supplied what you might call craft interest. I would try a tragedy, or an epic, or a comedy.’

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