Fabulous story straight from horses' mouths

JANE SMILEY makes it clear what the attraction is in New Zealand - horses. They are her passion, as well as the inspiration for her work and income, she tells CARROLL du CHATEAU.

Jane Smiley sits at her home in the glorious Carmel Valley, California, just along the coast from Big Sur, surrounded by three dogs - a Jack Russell, a golden retriever and a blue great dane.

Nearby, round a barn that could be straight out of one of her novels, are "more than 15" horses. "I don't count them or I'd panic."

And, yes, this writer of Horse Heaven, her great sprawling 561-page epic woven around six horses as its main characters, does believe in anthropomorphism - that animals have distinct, people-like personalities.

Not that Smiley is a fruitcake. "My feeling is that dog personalities are very dependent on breed, whereas horse personalities are more individual," she says in that vowel-stretched Iowa drawl. "I was just out riding before and I have this one who was trotting round with his tail right over his back. I said to my friend, 'He certainly thinks well of himself - look at me! I am beautiful!"'

A "very young" 51, Smiley also has three ex-husbands, a boyfriend, "a long and sordid past" and three children, Phoebe, 22, and Lucy, 18, from her marriage to William Silag (1978-1986) and AJ, 8, from her marriage to Stephen Mortensen (1987-1997).

Smiley's literary history is similarly long and fascinating. BA from Vassar College in 1971, PhD and Masters from the University of Iowa. Then, while holding down a teaching job at Iowa State University in Ames, she embarked on the first of 11 novels and novellas. Her eighth book, A Thousand Acres, won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

On May 16, the day before she leaves for Australia and the first leg of her trip to the Auckland Writers' Festival, she will be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York - a sort of academy awards for literature.

Despite the brilliance of her career, it is her passion for horses, particularly our reputation for racehorses such as Sunline, that tempted Smiley to New Zealand. "I plan to do the book stuff first, then spend a couple of days doing horse things," says Smiley, whose neighbour keeps his racehorses in New Zealand "because he thinks New Zealand is a better place - that the horses have better lives."

And later, "People tell me that the best horses over classic distances are bred in New Zealand and shipped over to Australia. It sounds heavenly."

After 20 years, Smiley is accomplished enough to savour, rather than to sweat over, her work. Her writing technique varies from book to book, "some are very schematic like A Thousand Acres, some are more amorphous and grow on their own." Either way she is that rare writer who loves settling down at her desk, with the ability to tackle styles borrowed from Shakespeare, Dickens and the rest with assurance and the urge to try new things.

She doesn't rewrite as she goes and maintains supreme confidence in her own good taste. Possible setbacks, such as the box-office panning of the movie version of A Thousand Acres, do not disconcert her. "I think it [the plot] was overwhelmed by the actors," she says. The only other movie interest right now, from the makers of Billy Elliott, is for a possible adaptation of Duplicate Keys, her novel about some not very successful New York rock'n'rollers. "They're maybe thinking of transplanting the story to Britain."

Despite her growing fame, pressure from publishers and a clamouring public, Smiley sticks to her own writing pace - a steady trot laced with a few irrepressible head tosses, producing a high quality, fresh 1000-odd words a day. "I write just a couple of hours in the mornings," she says. "It's not very onerous. Yes, the book does sit in the back of my head all the time, but I actually find writing novels very relaxing. You can think about the same thing every day - it's much more difficult to start and finish lots of different pieces."

At this pace, the half-a-brick-thick Horse Heaven, with its 50 memorable characters, took exactly two years from rough draft to finished galleys. Today, Smiley feels mildly short-changed. She was enjoying the writing so much, clustering the plot round her six horse heroes and following the American racing calendar "to keep me straight", she didn't want the process to end.

"But in the United States the only time people are interested in racing is around this time - the Kentucky Derby," she sighs. "And we couldn't wait a whole other year."

It was only five years ago that Smiley felt secure enough to give up her day job, to move to California and to take her other life ambition of breeding racehorses more seriously.

"Yes I am rich and famous, but not like Danielle Steele or John Grisham," she says. "We live in one of the most expensive suburbs of California, but the house itself is not grand."

Despite the bubbly personality, the rare ability to write believable sex scenes and her dabbles with the animal voice, Smiley is a learned and literary writer. Her books, rather than changing at random, reflect their author's interest in different styles - and her courage to attempt them. For example, the abrupt switch in style from the sparsely written, intensely domestic A Thousand Acres, a contemporary re-telling of King Lear through the perspectives of three daughters living on a flat, foreboding family farm in Iowa, to the funny, upbeat voice of her next novels, Moo and Horse Heaven comes, Smiley says, from two factors. "I do consciously try different forms. The comic style [of Horse Heaven] is often more exuberant and expansive than the realistic form. [Secondly], Moo and Horse Heaven are also both written in the third person omniscient [where the characters know everything], which means you're not limited by the voice of one character."

For her new novel - she is quarter of the way through - Smiley has returned to writing in the first person. After the freedom of the blockbusters, the more rigid, Charles Dickens-inspired style is troubling.

"I often feel that tension. When you're talking from one character's point-of-view what can you allow yourself to do?"

For someone whose last book was told from the points-of-view of six horses, and is convinced she can tell what horses are thinking - even, according to one article, if she simply sees them in the movies - you can understand the dilemma.

* Jane Smiley will be a guest at the Auckland Writers' Festival this month.