Taking Boccaccio's "Decameron" as her model, Smiley gives her version of a Hollywood novel in this sparkling tale about a group of friends and family gathered for ten transformative days in the Hollywood hills. Unabridged. 16 CDs.
Being someone who has worked in the entertainment industry for 18 years-- much of it with directors and writers on productions --in both TV and films-- and being socially comfortable in it, this dialogue plays as false. These people felt SO false. Painfully so. Almost like a car accident where I kept listening just to see how wrong it could get. Perhaps that's what Jane Smiley wants to believe people in Hollywood sound like and discuss. But the truth is that no one who is successful or has been that I know (and I do actually know many very successful people) stops to consider how they would light their life or shoot it for that matter. They are not this boring!!! And actually tend to find inspiration in life. They are creative. And passionate. Not vacuous and bland. And if they are vacuous, they use their Hollywood connections to get what they want and they don't shop on Melrose (other than at Fred Segal, etc.) And the sex scenes? Argh.
