“It was as if he had somehow embarked on a cruise, something he had avoided all his life,” Ms. Smiley writes, “and suddenly here he was, far out in a sea of languor with a group of people who on land could be avoided, and were therefore fine enough, but here, on this cruise, were insufferable. He sighed. They made him sigh. It was not precisely that they were boring, but more that they caused the expansion of time, so that every second, every moment, swelled to infinity.”

The venerable Michiko Kakutani reviews Jane Smiley's Ten Days in the Hills. (NYTs)