JANE SMILEY Some Luck. Reviewed by Robyne Young
Smiley returns to Iowa, the setting of her Pulitzer-Prize winning novel A Thousand Acres, in this first book of an epic new trilogy.
It was chance that took the 19-year-old Jane Smiley to Iowa in 1972, and some further luck that gave her a place in the renowned Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 1975-76. Smiley says if she hadn’t lived in and around Iowa City for nine years she would not have given birth to her three children nor written a number of novels, including her 1992 Pulitzer-Prize winner, A Thousand Acres, a retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear set on an Iowan farm, with generational conflict at its core.
In Some Luck, the first novel in her new trilogy, The Last Hundred Years, Smiley returns to the Iowan farmscape near the town of Denby to cultivate ground for her epic family saga centred on the Langdons and, in this first volume, covering the years 1920 to 1953. The trilogy will eventually cover 100 years from 1920 to 2019.
The structure of giving each year its own chapter reminded me of the annual Christmas letter, reporting, without the embellishment of contemporary Yuletide correspondence, the world of the farm and the impact of larger historical events, including the Depression, World War II and the Cold War.
The novel opens on the eve of Walter Langdon’s 25th birthday. Recently married to Rosanna Vogel, Walter reflects on a good year where he has been able not only to break even, but also to pay interest on his debt. He had chosen to buy his own farm with its farmhouse, ‘(you could practically see through the walls, they were so thin)’, rather than stay living with his parents and have his new wife move in with them, where ‘… his father would have walked into his room day and night without knocking, bursting with another thing that Walter had to know or do or remember or finish’.
Walter has already worked out his own philosophy of child-rearing:
After all no fledgling had it easy, farmer or crow. Hadn’t he known since he was a boy the way the fledglings had to fall out of the nest and walk about, cheeping and crying, until they grew out their feathers and learned to fly on their own? Their helpless parents flew above them, and maybe dropped them a bit of food, but flying or succumbing belonged to them alone.
He thinks about his luck wooing Rosanna: ‘[she was] most beautiful, and that is why he had set his heart upon winning her when he came home from the war and finally really noticed her, though she went to the Catholic church.’ She was ‘… just twenty, but with the self-possessed grace of a mature woman!’
Writing in third-person omniscient, Smiley still achieves an intimacy with the main characters while telling this sweeping story. I knew the thoughts of each of the Langdon family members and became quite fond of them, including the children: Frank, Joe, Mary Elizabeth, Lillian, Henry and Claire. The effect of this was to heighten the joys and deepen the tragedies throughout the novel.
The strongest of the children’s voices belongs to the eldest, Frank. Headstrong and inquisitive, the three-and-a-half year old is bewildered by his own behaviour:
It was sometimes beyond Frank to understand why he sometimes did the very thing he was told not to do. It seemed like once they told him not do it – once they said it and put it in his mind – then what else was there to do? It was like smacking Joey. ‘Don’t hit your brother. Don’t ever hit your brother, do you understand?’ … But what was hitting? Sometimes when Joey was walking along all you had to do was touch him and he fell down and cried.
As he grows up Frank is quick to learn. He leaves the farm to go to school in Chicago and later to college, where he works on a project to turn corn into gunpowder, while Joe, who has taken over his late uncle’s farm, by accident breeds a new hybrid of corn and becomes comparatively rich. At the 1939 Thanksgiving, Joey is teased about his newfound wealth. He is aware that the price he receives for his corn won’t last forever, but comes into conflict with Walter, who maintains his cautious attitude: ‘Scarcity is your friend, not plenty …’ – a foreshadowing of the dangers that may come later when Joe trials a new type of fertiliser, the impacts of which I am sure will feature in the next volume.
It is not only through the children that the link between the farm and the outside world grows. Farm practices are modernised, the household gets a car, telephone and electricity, and radio brings world news into the family kitchen. Discussions at the dinner table move beyond the farm to politics:
Joe wasn’t sure he had ever heard his parents argue about politics, especially with slightly raised voices. He and Lillian exchanged a glance. Henry said, ‘My science teacher said that they didn’t find any radiation at Hiroshima, and that the Japanese lied about it.’
Rosanna, who has birthed her first five children at home, delivers the sixth, Claire, in the hospital in Usherton. Initially relieved to have a rest after her daughter is born –‘After Dr. Liscombe delivered Claire, they took her away and didn’t bring her back for four hours. What a relief that was!’ – she is not so enamoured of the new hospital procedures that enforce a ‘strict schedule’. In a clear demonstration of knowing what is best for her child, she escapes the hospital. Once home:
The kitchen was cold, the range hadn’t been lit in three days, and Rosanna suddenly missed the dull luxury of the hospital. But she knew this was her life. Better to be immersed in it than to see it from afar.
And it was this immersion into the lives of the Langdons, four generations of them in Some Luck, that I enjoyed: their individual experiences amplified through the detail of each of their lives.
At Thanksgiving in 1948 Rosanna surveys her family and recalls the strange events, the chances, the near misses, the deaths and concludes:
She could not have created this moment, these lovely faces, these candles flickering, the flash of the silverware, the fragrances of the food hanging over the table, the heads turning this way and that, the voices murmuring and laughing. She looked at Walter, who was so far away from her, all the way at the other end of the table, having a laugh, with Andrea, who had a beautiful suit on, navy blue with a tiny waist and collar and cuffs. As if on cue, Walter turned from Andrea and looked at Rosanna, and they agreed in that instant: something had created itself from nothing – a dumpy old house had been filled, if only for this moment, with twenty-three different worlds, each one of them rich and mysterious. Rosanna wrapped her arms around herself for a moment and sat down.
The end of the novel sets the scene for the next volume, Early Warning, that will span the 1950s to the 1980s. Had it been available I would have picked it up immediately, grateful for the luck that introduced Smiley to Iowa some 43 years ago.
Jane Smiley Some Luck Picador 2015 PB 400pp $19.99
Robyne Young writes fiction, poetry and non-fiction, blogs at robynewithane.wordpress.com and works as the Communications Officer at Regional Arts NSW.
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