Jane Smiley.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Interview

Jane Smiley is one of the leading novelists of our day. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction back in 1992 for A Thousand Acres , a harrowing retelling of the King Lear story from the standpoint of the sisters, who have to contend with a father who raped them in their teens and bullied them all their lives. She's written ten other novels, including Moo and her most recent, Ten Days in the Hills , which takes place in Hollywood, starting with the day George Bush launched the Iraq War. In this novel, Smiley's politics ring clear, as her protagonist, Elena, assails the Iraq War. When her lover says, "I want to fuck," she says, "Stop the war."

Smiley, who also has written a biography of Charles Dickens, champions fiction in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel , and then she takes a look at 100 of them.

For the last couple of years, Smiley has written a blog for Huffington Post , where she has cut loose with attacks against the Bush Administration, guns, religion, and Democratic cowardice. She took a break from the blog in May, and has returned to it a couple of times since.

Smiley is also an avid horsewoman. She owns, rides, and trains them, and she writes about them, too, in Horse Heaven .

I flew out to California to interview Smiley on August 14. On a cloudless morning in Carmel Valley, I pulled up to her place near Story Road, up a steep hill. We were going to talk in her home, but she was having a new roof put on, so we went into town and sat in a coffee shop for two and a half hours. Standing at six-feet-two, and wearing a straw hat, Smiley was instantly recognizable by many people in the shop--but not for being a novelist.

"Are you Jane?" one woman asked. After getting an affirmative response, she continued: "How are your horses?"

Another woman exclaimed how fun the riding lessons were that they had taken the day before.

And one man asked her right away about the possibility of Al Gore getting into the Presidential race.

Smiley's fourteen-year-old son came by, and I offered him a copy of The Progressive . "What kind of magazine is it?" he asked. When I told him it was about politics, he dashed away. Her partner, Jack, also stopped by a couple of times during our expansive conversation. For all her fame, she seemed eager to talk about politics and novels, and her demeanor was jovial and down to earth.

Q: How did you get started writing for Huffington Post ?

Jane Smiley: I had written a piece right around the time of Katrina. I sent it to the L.A. Times , and they weren't interested, so I put it away. But it so happened my partner and I were going on the Nation cruise as paid customers, and Arianna was on the cruise. And it also so happened that I was seated at her table. Arianna was a little late. So I made sure her seat was next to mine. Arianna is an incredibly well-mannered person, and when she sat down, she said, "Who are you? What's...