The middle years
If we’re lucky, life is long and mostly doesn’t organize itself in traditional plotlines with conflict, climax and denouement. We make mistakes, we recover, and we err again. We suffer loves, losses, happy accidents and grave disappointments, and continue to muddle on. So too with the Langdon family, whose fates we gladly continue to follow in “Early Warning,” the wonderful second installment of Jane Smiley’s ambitious project, the “Last Hundred Years” trilogy.
In the first book, “Some Luck,” we met Walter and Rosanna Langdon and their baby, Frank. The year was 1920, and the Langdons had just purchased their Iowa farm. That novel spanned 33 years and witnessed births, marriages, deaths and drought, as well as major historical events: the Great Depression, World War II and the start of the Cold War.
“Early Warning” picks up in 1953, at Walter’s funeral, and follows the family for another 33 years, through the third generation. The Langdons observe and participate in historic events — the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations, nefarious acts of the CIA, the mass suicide of Rev. Jim Jones’ followers and the rise of AIDS. Shifting social trends also buffet the family — attitudes toward child rearing, women’s roles, psychiatry and mental health, gays and even smoking. At one point a character says, “Nothing wrong with smoking.” Then she continues, “A pack of cigarettes is a little treasure, is what I think.” We all know that doesn’t bode well.
In fact, as the title suggests, “Early Warning” is tinged with vague and real dread — not only the Cold War dread of nuclear annihilation, which keeps several characters awake at night and sends one on a particularly harrowing journey through psychotherapy, but also dread of the draft, of cults, of AIDS, of potential childhood accidents (in pools, on horses, in fast cars and from hammer-wielding siblings), of the risk of giving birth at home in a bathtub and, for quite a few characters, of Ronald Reagan ascending to the White House.
Yet what’s most captivating about “Early Warning” is not the panoramic view of largescale historical events or the shifting social zeitgeist of our country; they are mere background for the minutiae of the characters’ lives, longings and disappointments. Smiley deftly shifts point of view, from toddler to grandmother, often in the same chapter. We intimately come to know all the Langdons and the high emotional stakes in their lives.
Claire enters her marriage full of hope, only to discover that her husband is cold and controlling. Frank, disappoint- ed in his children, tries to toughen up his toddler twin boys by creating an obstacle course in the living room and goading them into stiff competition that eventually permeates their lives. Henry, a closeted gay man, never speaks to his family about his sexuality. Joe struggles to keep his farm despite grain embargoes and falling prices, and worries for his son, who has chosen to make a life in Iowa. Lillian heads off to visit her golden son, who is failing out of college. She asks him if he is OK. “She realized that this was a question he could not answer, at least to her. If everything was not okay, than had she and Arthur failed? If everything was okay, would her concern push Tim into everything’s not being okay?”
No surprise that the relationship between child and parent is paramount in this family saga. Children struggle to break away, to step into their own agency. Parents continue to guide and control, doing their best but secondguessing their actions — all the while searching for a glimmer of themselves in their offspring, both as a way to understand the next generation and to forgive themselves for their parental failings.
Smiley poses large questions and offers powerful insights. Are human beings essentially good? Can we survive our childhood? Is it possible to feel gratitude and relief in our mediocre lives? She not only asks if love is enough, but for some of the family, she asks if love is even possible. Near the end, a father tells his grown daughter, “You must know that you don’t love your children for being good or bad.” He continues, saying you love them “because they don’t know what’s coming and maybe you do.” Therein lies the heartbreak. All of it is coming — the striving and settling, the misunderstandings, the losses and the many joys.