LOS ANGELES — Jane Smiley was walking on a sunny afternoon near the top of San Remo, a winding street in Los Angeles' Pacific Palisades section. This was the block where the 57-year-old novelist pictured the home of Max, the possibly past-his-prime Oscar-winning film director who is at the center of her new book, "Ten Days in the Hills" (Knopf, $26).

It's billed as a Hollywood novel, but it's just as much a novel about sex, and it's a novel that feels burrowed into Los Angeles' landscape and real estate. Smiley uses a Decameron-like setup: A group of Max's family and friends hole up for 10 days in March 2003 that happen to fall just after the Oscars and just at the beginning of the Iraq war.

They tell a lot of stories and have a lot of sex, both the relationship kind and the justfor-kicks kind, all of which Smiley describes patiently and in detail.

There's a detour to a bigger and much more elaborate house owned by some shady Russians, but the heart of the book is in Max's place on this green and pretty street, with its soaring glimpses of canyon between the closely set houses. They look spiffy but homey, too. "You can see how these houses are modest, in their way," Smiley said.

Such houses, for Smiley, represent a certain strata of Hollywood occupied by the characters in her book, who include 58-year-old Max; his down-to-earth 50-year-old girlfriend, Elena; his glamorous actress-singer ex-wife, Zoe; their serious-minded daughter, Isabel; and Zoe's Jamaican mother, Delphine, who still lives in Max's guest house.

Max may have an Oscar, and Zoe may be a national sex symbol, but they are members of the working Hollywood that people often find to be surprisingly Midwestern.

"These are people who came from modest backgrounds, worked hard and were interested in what they were doing," Smiley said of her characters.

"And so they haven't been living in the world of Hollywood as a playground for the fabulously wealthy. Because I just don't see how a director or producer or anyone who wanted to have a long and productive career could party all night and do drugs and still do the work."

Smiley was raised in Missouri and lived for years in Iowa until she moved to California in 1997. In Carmel Valley, she has happily immersed herself in writing books and raising and riding thoroughbreds, blogging furiously against the Bush administration for the Huffington Post and, after three divorces, living harmoniously with the man she calls her "partner," Jack Canning, a handsome, blue-eyed Eastern transplant and real-estate agent turned contractor, whom she met when he did work on her house. She has a 14-year-old at home and two grown children.

All the usual tropes of the Hollywood novel are conspicuously absent from "Ten Days in the Hills."

It is not concerned with the bleak decline of its characters' souls, or their bloated egos, or the willful destruction of American moviemaking by wicked studio executives, or the ugly truths lurking behind the pretty surfaces of Hollywood.

The novel does not contain the words "Botox" or "liposuction." Yes, the Iraq war casts a shadow over the novel's privileged L.A. residents, and yes, there are shady Russian money men involved, but mostly it's a book in which Hollywood is boiled down to its most life-affirming essences: sex, work and storytelling.