On the farm
“Some Luck,” Jane Smiley’s 14th work of fiction, is a multigenerational saga chronicling an Iowa farm family from 1920 through 1953. It’s merely the first volume of a projected trilogy, “The Last Hundred Years,” that will explore the American experience up to 2020. One wonders, though, if readers will be willing to follow.
Part of the problem is Smiley’s decision to devote a chapter to every year. We all know that some years are more eventful than others, which is why novelists usually decline to straitjacket themselves in this way. So the pace of “Some Luck” is slow, the drama low key, as the author moves her characters quietly, matter-of-factly through the days.
The opening scene, however, is quite good. Walter Langdon, 25 and married with a newborn son, walking his fence line along the creek, spots a huge horned owl swoop down from the sky to snatch a rabbit cowering on the ground. Walter is anxious — worried about debts, his father’s intrusiveness, how to pay the hired hand. At any moment, Smiley suggests, a farmer is likely to end up as prey, and luck always plays its random, capricious role.
Even better, in the same chapter, the author allows us to see the world from baby Frank’s cradle: “He now knew where the noise came from and how to make it ... you opened your mouth and pressed the noise out.” It’s a brilliant technique, but pursued less successfully with other characters.
Frank, in fact, is the only one who intrigues us with his resourcefulness and willingness to take risks. He’s so smart, so curious, that we know he’s destined for greater things beyond the farm. Rosanna, devoted mother, loyal helpmeet to Walter, never engages except as an example of maternal self-sacrifice.
Frank’s siblings, as they come along, seem fairly onedimensional. Brother Joe, stolid and dependable, will always stay down on the farm. Lillian, not of much interest herself, manages to marry a fascinating CIA agent and get away. Another sister dies in infancy. Henry, a budding literary intellectual, looks to be a live wire for future volumes, but he’s still a student at this novel’s conclusion. Claire is younger yet.
As much an adventurer as Rosanna is a homebody, her sister Eloise takes flight to Chicago during the ’30s. There she discovers love and communism with Julius Silber, while Rosanna retreats into fundamentalism with Pastor Elmore. Once Frank is shipped off to Chicago for better schooling, the metropolis itself jump-starts his education in big-city sophistication. It won’t rub off, even in college at Iowa State.
Smiley ushers us through Depression, World War II and Cold War, though these great events are usually viewed obliquely and from a distance. Frank’s experience is the exception, after he enlists in the army and puts his sharpshooter skills to good use in North Africa and Italy. In the postwar years, Eloise’s husband taps him to monitor possible Soviet spies on the East Coast. All this sounds much more exciting than the author makes it. In keeping with her overall narrative strategy, she mutes any suspense. And any time action does break out somewhere, she soon takes us back to the slower rhythms of the farm.
“Some Luck” does have its moments, but it lacks the intensity and high drama of Smiley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Thousand Acres,” an updated “King Lear” also set on an Iowa farm. And there’s none of the low-down hilarity that animated “Moo,” that farce set on a large ag campus much like Iowa State, where Smiley once taught. No character as vivid as the venomous Lear figure, Larry Cook, or Earl Butz, the hog who’s “as big as a Volkswagen Beetle and much faster,” inhabits these pages.
No, in returning to an Iowa setting, Smiley seems determined to pay homage to a simple way of life based on hard work, resilience and luck. At the same time, she’s tracking how technology and globalization changed the face of farming forever.
Smiley doesn’t idealize farm life. Sibling rivalries, resentments and small-mindedness abound. But her Iowans are all basically good people, neither scoundrels nor ne’er-dowells. These laconic strivers don’t suddenly morph into weirdness or madness, even when they venture into the rest of America.
Given that it’s part of a trilogy, the book inevitably stops in mid-stream. Though the patriarch Walter dies, the remaining characters still have more living ahead.
In this way, “Some Luck” resembles the kind of series that now reign on television, where every episode concludes with loose ends. Still, we get hooked on the characters’ foibles, flaws and unresolved dilemmas, and we can’t stop. We don’t care if we have to wait another week to find out what happens.
But what if you don’t have a Don Draper or Tony Soprano on center stage? What then?