Ten Days in the Hills, by Jane Smiley

"Amazing... Like Dr Zhivago, but funny!" Passing through a newsagent's in an American airport, I noticed this preposterous quote on the cover of the US edition of Ten Days in the Hills, perched on the "Great Reads" shelf. The book doesn't deserve this reductio ad absurdam (it's nothing like Zhivago); moreover, it is a "Great Read" in the sense that, say, Malory is. You have to put work in to enjoy its considerable dividends.

The novel is a modern version of Boccaccio's Decameron, set in the Hollywood Hills ("Like Boccaccio, but with Alfafa sprouts!" would have been more like it). The medieval masterpiece informs its structure - ten chapters for ten days, each containing ten or so tales - as well as its tone. Does not this description of Paul, a new-age healer, have a ring of Chaucer, the English Boccaccio? "He travelled near and far. His hair and beard were shiny, his breath was pleasant, and his sweat smelled good. He could walk for hours and stand on his head... He had no children, and his parents were dead."

The sex scenes, and the frank, amused attitude to priapism, have a sense of medieval bawdy, too: "Once, in the Hustler store on Sunset, they had gone through all the dildos to find the one that most resembled him. In the end, they had settled on the 'Big Classic'. Now though, the Big Classic had subsided into cushy somnolence."

Though there are passages here that might contend for the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award, Ten Days... would not be a worthy winner. Smiley always feels in control of the effect, whether to make us cringe, to titter or to sigh.

As with the Decameron, stories-within-stories turn the book into a literary cabinet of curiosities. There are anecdotes from Vietnam, told by a veteran; there are speeches for and against the Iraq war (analogous to the plague in the Decameron, it preoccupies the characters but does not afflict them). There are folk tales, fragments from newspapers, dreams, descriptions of paintings. And - this is Hollywood - there are films.

Classics are described, and new films created in the characters' heads. Some are unfilmable visions; others, like Elena's anti-war movie, you can imagine seeing - or avoiding - at the cinema. The sections about films are enjoyable exercises for the imagination. Other digressions are more like hard work, sometimes luminous, but often whimsical. The modern reader, raised on a diet of teleological, driven narratives, chokes at first on this dilatory structure. You mentally scythe through the verbiage, looking for a point. But gradually you enjoy this airiness, this capaciousness.

The harder you look, the more you see. John Updike, in The New Yorker, has detected references to the Trojan war: Elena (Helen) is married to Max (Menelaus) and visited by Cassie (Cassandra). I became convinced that Max's erectile dysfunction, linked to his wife's hatred of the Iraq war, was an allusion to Aristophanes' Lysistrata.

Towards its close, the book becomes richly allegorical. On Day Seven, the characters decamp to a villa of surreal luxury in Beverly Hills. Smiley has a lot of imaginative fun here. The lights come on and off when you shout at them, rare birds sing in the garden, a stream flows over stones of agate. This is the locus amoenus, or pleasant place, of medieval literature, where lovers find one another (and these ones do).

The splendour is also ominous, recalling the eschatological setting at the end of the Middle English poem Pearl. And does it prophesy, obliquely, our civilisation's doom? Elena abruptly ends a list of her wants with, "I want not to be sliding into a new dark age." But this note of millennial anxiety sounds alongside many other accents in this multi-tonal, captivatingly subtle novel.