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Jane Smiley's capacious new novel, "Ten Days in the Hills" (Knopf; $26), does not give the reader a warm welcome--the first chapter is cloying and confusing--but accommodates him amply enough so that at the end, four hundred and fifty pages later, he is reluctant to leave. The ten chapters are named for ten successive days; the first, "DAY ONE ? Monday, March 24, 2003," comes five days after the U.S.-led coalition initiated the second Gulf War. More than seven thousand miles from Baghdad, in Pacific Palisades, California, within sight of the Getty Center shining on its hill, a woman simply called Elena awakes, full of memories of last night's Academy Awards ceremony, ...