Family farm tale ‘Some Luck’ plants the seeds of a trilogy
Kevin Nance
It’s difficult to pronounce anything like a definitive judgment on Some Luck, the first installment in a new trilogy of novels following an Iowa farm couple, Walter and Rosanna Langdon, and their ultimately far-flung offspring over an entire century beginning in 1920.
Unlike, say, John Updike’s celebrated Rabbit Angstrom series, which unfolded in four stand-alone novels set roughly a decade apart, Jane Smiley’s project is a single flowing narrative. We don’t yet know how the story will develop or how it will end. The second and third parts of the trilogy are scheduled to be published next year, and until then, we can’t see how the narrative seeds the author has planted in this first volume will germinate and grow to maturity later on.
That said, it seems reasonable to expect an abundant harvest.
Some Luck is the auspicious beginning of what promises to be an American saga every bit as ambitious as Updike’s magnum opus. And in terms of historical sweep and diversity of setting, Smiley’s tale already outdistances Updike’s. While the Rabbit novels stayed snugly within a suburban context, Smiley’s latest is anchored in the satisfactions and challenges of life on a farm but expands with the Langdon diaspora to various American cities and beyond.
The odd and perhaps miraculous thing about this almost ridiculously grandiose undertaking is how intimate it feels and, page by page, how little it announces itself as a masterpiece in the making.
Part of that modesty is grounded in Smiley’s remarkable pa- tience. Much of the first half of Some Luck is concerned with the minutiae of the Langdon dynasty as it comes into being — beginning with the infancy of their first child, Frankie, soon followed by his brother Joey and other siblings. The way Smiley gets deep inside these children’s heads, articulating their thoughts before and after they have the language to articulate those thoughts, is a staggering literary feat in which we see human characters being assembled in something that feels like real time.
Frankie — Frank, as he’s later called — is one of the most fascinating and complex characters in recent fiction. Early on, he shows signs of iconoclastic stubbornness, unable to resist his passions even when they put him in danger of punishment. (Walter does not spare the rod.) He endlessly torments Joey but develops a strong sense of injustice; his highly intelligent ways of dealing with bullies at school presage his effectiveness as a leader in the Army during World War II and, later, as an unofficial counterintelligence agent.
Smiley drops some hints that the matter of Frank’s romantic and sexual life may hold some surprises to come, but we’ll have to wait till next year to find out.