Feb. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Five men and five women gather in a hilltop mansion in Los Angeles. The Iraq War has just begun, and they talk about it and talk about it.

But because they would prefer not talking about it (if they could only stop thinking about it), they watch movies (of course, because they're in the home of a famous director) and they tell stories -- dozens of them, intricate, funny, revealing, bizarre, risque. When they're not talking, most of them keep busy copulating.

In fact, there's so much sex in ``Ten Days in the Hills,'' Jane Smiley's delectable new novel, and it's so explicit that the question arises: Is this porn?

I'd say no. Porn is often in the mind of the beholder, and my own mind was hardly so mesmerized by the sex that I forgot the virtuosity of the writing. (I've never read such splendid renderings of kisses, of the sensation of kissing.)

Smiley's descriptions are more than graphic: They're so closely observed that without the transforming power of art they would be clinical. The art, however, is of a high order. Since I had heard that ``Ten Days in the Hills'' was a Hollywood novel, I expected backstabbing, power grabs, cynicism. But this book, full of tenderness, introspection and serious debate, hardly belongs to the genre.

The Pacific Palisades house where most of it is set belongs to Nathan ``Max'' Maxwell, an Oscar-winning (though now coasting) screenwriter and director. His lover, Elena, a writer of self- help books, is around much of the time, and his ex-mother-in-law, Delphine, still lives in the guest house.

Harmonic Convergence

On March 24, 2003, the day after the Oscars and four days after the opening salvos of the Iraq War, seven more guests converge, including Max's ex-wife, Zoe, a movie star, and her new lover, Paul, a yoga adept and spiritual adviser; Max and Zoe's 23-year-old daughter; Elena's randy 20-year-old son; and Max's agent, Delphine's best friend and the wild card, Charlie, a high- school buddy of Max's who is the book's token Republican.

I think the use of ``token'' is fair here, and I also think Charlie represents a small failure on Smiley's part, because even though he's believable (and he triggers the funniest scene in the book), Smiley, whose own politics are apparent, can't bring herself to like him.

She can't grant him his political dignity, either. When Charlie finally gets his big speech defending the war, she clips him in a small but obvious way: She gives him arguments that were plausible (to some) in 2003 but that time has proved fallacious.

She can't love Paul the guru either, and at one climactic point she pulls the rug out from under him by putting a small, self-serving, utterly plausible lie on his lips. I wish she hadn't: Paul is more interesting, and a more original creation, as the genuine article than he is as a charlatan.

Boccaccio and Eliot

Smiley's model for her novel was ``The Decameron,'' Boccaccio's 14th-century collection of a hundred tales (10 told by each of 10 people over 10 days), and this template accounts for its odd form. But its feeling comes, even more oddly, closer to the expansiveness of the great Victorian novels.

Partly this semblance has to do with the masterly way that Smiley inhabits her characters, but it has even more to do with the humanistic (and human) concerns of the book. This is a novel about youth and age, sex and love, privilege and war, longing and the making of art, and Smiley approaches it with wisdom, a quality that was once considered essential to novel writing but is now viewed with suspicion.

In her 57 years, Smiley has clearly been doing more than sitting in a room and writing. She's learned a thing or two about life, and she isn't embarrassed to be telling us. George Eliot, if she could get past all the sex (a big if), would smile on this book.

``Ten Days in the Hills'' is published by Knopf (449 pages, $26).

(Craig Seligman is an editor for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this story: Craig Seligman in New York at cseligman@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: February 14, 2007 00:02 EST