Novel chameleon

Author Jane Smiley. Photo / Supplied

There are authors who can be relied on to turn out the same sort of book time and again. Then there are those who dare to cover fresh ground with each work. Pulitzer prize-winner Jane Smiley definitely stands in the latter camp. In her 30-year writing career she's never felt obliged to do what her readers expect of her.

"I started out with a plan all those years ago that I would do a tragedy, a romance, a comedy and an epic," she says from her home near Monterey, California.

"I grew up reading Shakespeare so thought that's what writers did, tried different forms.

"The people raking in millions are the ones who do the same thing over and over again. I don't think I could have done that. I've read of writers like John Grisham who get fed up with it but they're stuck because they have to satisfy reader expectations. But I like to do what I want in every area of my life. I don't want to feel pressured in any way."

Smiley's latest novel, Private Life (Allen & Unwin, $38.99), is about a fairly unexceptional woman, Margaret Mayfield, and covers the course of her life from the late 1800s to World War II. In danger of becoming an old maid at 27, her family considers it "a piece of luck" when Margaret is married off to an eminent astronomer and naval officer. Gradually she uncovers the truth about this man she must share her life with. He is a crackpot, obsessed with implausible theories, an outcast from the scientific world. And yet, as his wife, she feels obliged to stand by him no matter what.

Smiley based the couple on one of her great aunts who was married to a naval astronomer. "I don't exactly remember at which point I decided they would make a novel," says the 60-year-old writer. "I never met them and we didn't talk about them much when I was a kid. But I came across a 1920s clipping from the LA Examiner. It was a full page and the headline said: `The aether exists and I have seen It'.

"I thought this guy deserved to be resurrected. Then, as I learned more about him, I began to find her more mysterious. Grandiose egomaniacs are pretty much run-of-the-mill - the real question is how people tolerate them."

There are echoes of classic writers here: from Jane Austen to Louisa May Alcott. Historic events take place mostly offstage - the influenza epidemic, the San Francisco earthquake - while Margaret's life is made up of small domesticities and personal tragedies, as she is slowly stifled by marriage until brought to screaming point by the very sight of her husband.

"I've been married three times," says Smiley. "And I think there's always that sense of your partner's personality expanding and contracting. Some spouses take up quite a lot of space and if you have one like that you can feel, `how am I going to put up with this?'"

Private Life is nowhere near as dark as the novel for which Smiley is probably best known, A Thousand Acres, which bagged her a Pulitzer back in 1992. She says winning one of the world's most prestigious fiction prizes didn't change her life much.

"It made me more famous and it plumped up my pay cheque but it didn't change my approach at all and it wasn't allowed to turn my head.

"I had two kids and was four months' pregnant with the third and throwing up all the time so I had to stay home. I wasn't distracted by heading off on a world tour as I've heard other writers have been. It wasn't an option for me."

These days, with her children grown, Smiley is free to focus on her twin passions - writing and riding. She has six horses, three of which are at a ranch five minutes from her home. She competes in nearby shows.

"A lot of times I'll have been pondering something while I'm writing and when I get on the horse it will all click into place in my head," she says.

"Sometimes if I ride in the morning I'm too blissed out to get much work done for the rest of the day but I've come to terms with that at this point."

This year also sees the release of a children's novel that has a horsy theme and Smiley, who is relentlessly versatile, is completing a non-fiction book about the invention of the computer as well as working on another novel that she says, rather like Private Life, filters historical events through the stories of her characters.
Fiction remains her greatest source of pleasure and she sits down every single day to write or read some kind of novel.

"I wrote a book called 13 Ways Of Looking At A Novel and for that I read around 130 books," she says. "I thought after that I might breathe a sigh of relief and go and watch TV but it didn't happen.

"I find reading is a self-propagating activity and the more I read the more I want to address different ideas and issues in my own writing.

"I find myself more interested in my writing than I used to be," she says. "It doesn't get old. I want to try something and off I go and try it."