Fall is the finest time to be a bibliophile. It’s the season of real books, when the term “beach read”, with all its lightweight implications, is packed up for another year. Fall 2014 offers an especially tantalizing reading list, including new work from William Gibson, Margaret Atwood, Kathryn Harrison, and David Mitchell. Hardly last on the this august list is Jane Smiley, who delivers with Some Luck.
Smiley’s output in recent years has been spotty. Many devoted fans were driven to desperation when writing about horses threatened to overtake her work. Some feared horses would be for Smiley what Christianity became for Anne Lamott: an obsession bringing great personal joy while effectively ending her fiction career.
Smiley fans not fearing fictive death-by-equine harbored other concerns. Namely, Ten Days in the Hills. Most were baffled by this sexually graphic take on Boccaccio’s The Decameron. Worse than the endless boffing was the book’s surprising dullness. Critics were not kind. Smiley rallied in 2010 with Private Life, but it isn’t her strongest work.
Some Luck banishes these concerns. In it, Smiley returns to Iowa farm life and its people, introducing the Langdon family of Denby, Iowa.
Some Luck is a quiet book. It has none of the postmodernism’s pyrotechnics, no narrators named Jane Smiley, no drawings or websites inset into the text. The novel is set between 1920 and 1953, meaning a great deal transpires directly impacting the Langdons: mechanization, modernization, the Depression, World War II. Births, deaths, events large and small are folded into the larger picture of the Langdon family and their place in American history.
Lest this sound like criticism, it’s anything but. Smiley’s writing on American rural life is arguably her finest work. Consider the Pulitzer-winning A Thousand Acres, or the criminally overlooked The Greenlanders. Both novels are set on farms. The Karlson family of Smiley’s debut,Barn Blind , are not dissimilar to the Langdons: family life, a farm setting, a mother who makes a religious conversion. And although Moo is a comic academic novel, its setting is an Agricultural University whose many characters hail from farming backgrounds.
Walter and Rosanna Langdon evoke adjectives like “decent”, “sturdy” and “good stock”. Walter has recently returned home after fighting in France, marrying the former Rosanna Vogel. The couple have an infant son, Frank, and are working to establish their farm.
Walter and Rosanna eventually have five children: Frank, Joe, Lillian, Henry, and Claire. Although narrative space is given to each child, Smiley devotes special attention to Frank, who is brilliant, gifted, and strangely amoral. The youthful Frank thinks rules exist to be evaded or broken. A loner, he quickly learns to quietly disobey those adults he cannot charm. He bullies smaller children, including brother Joe, while coping with bigger schoolyard bruisers by outsmarting them. Only Rosanna’s sister Eloise, who lives with the family as a mother’s helper, is unmoved by Frank’s tantrums or charm offensives. He therefore respects her.
By age nine Frank is assigned heavy farm chores, which he performs well. But his restless nature cannot be quieted. By adolescence, he is out of control. An overwhelmed Rosanna writes Eloise, now living in Chicago, getting the response she’d hoped for: Eloise offers to take Frank in. After a grueling train trip, Frank joins his aunt and her husband, communist Julius Silber. The argumentative couple enroll Frank in the local high school, lecture him on Marx, and let him loose.
Eventually Frank enlists in the Army, where he is trained as a sniper and sent to Europe. He returns physically unharmed, but suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. His polished exterior makes him a natural for nascent McCarthyist activities.
Readers of Smiley’s fiction may be reminded of a quieter Marcus Burns, Good Faith’s slick real estate investor, or Tim Monahan, Moo’s lecherous creative writing professor. But Frank’s indifference to others makes him more disturbing than either man.
Joey Langdon is nothing like his elder brother. A skilled farmer with a love for animals, Joey literally charms the birds from the trees. On a no-nonsense farm, where animals are raised for work and food, Joey names every last stray pup and scrawny kitten. As an adult, he allows his dogs and cats into the house. While Walter sows oats, Joey hybridizes corn and grows soybeans. Walter is scornful until the money pours in.
Lillian is a quiet, well-behaved child whose arrival lifts Rosanna from emotional and religious crisis. Though the Langdons are nominal churchgoers, none are especially devout. But in 1925, tragedy strikes, and a guilty Rosanna turns to Christianity. Walter goes along, more to please Rosanna than out of true belief. Lillian’s birth offers some succor, for in addition to her demeanor, she is a beautiful child. But like Frank, she leaves the farm for the city, part of an increasing rural exodus.
Henry Langdon arrives so quickly Rosanna has no time get help. Instead, she gives birth alone, tying off the umbilical cord with a shoelace. Although Henry’s intelligence rivals Frank’s, it manifests in a love of reading. By high school, Henry is reading in French and German. In college, Henry majors in English, making anxious plans to learn Latin, all the while hiding his major from Walter and Rosanna, who think he is studying medicine.
Claire Langdon, the youngest, is the only Langdon needing glasses. This perceived weakness irritates Rosanna. Claire is the only child Walter has time for: a tractor and Joe’s help mean more leisure time for his youngest child.
Smiley is gifted at detailing topics that would stultify in the hands of lesser writers. See her deft explanations of real estate law in Good Faith, or here, her depictions of daily life on a working farm. Rural living has lately been viewed as an artisanal idyll, but Smiley bluntly puts paid to the fantasy: the Langdons work hard indoors and out, often in harsh conditions. The greatest caution must constantly be taken lest an accident occur.
Rosanna Landgon’s chores are backbreaking: sewing the family’s clothing, keeping chickens, candling eggs, churning butter, and canning the farm’s produce, not to mention the daily cooking, cleaning, and childcare. Outdoors, Walter mends fences, plants the fields and the garden, then harvests. When his hired hand Ragnar marries and departs, he patiently teaches Frank farm chores, educating urban readers as well.
Some Luck covers an era of significant shifts in rural America: from horse to tractor, candlelight to electricity, wells to indoor plumbing. Walter watches with confusion and envy when neighbor Roland Frederick acquires a tractor. Soon Rosanna will pester him for a Model T. Gradually the farm transitions from a place inhabited by horses, chickens, and sheep to a fully mechanized operation where corn and soybeans are the only crops. Wires are run to for electricity; Joey earns enough from his hybrid corn crop to install an “inside bathroom”.
The wider world is also changing. Walter Langdon was in Europe during the 1918 Influenza Epidemic that killed his only brother and approximately 650,000 other Americans. When the Crash of 1929 and ensuing Great Depression hit, Denby is also struck by drought. Walter takes to anxiously walking a local dry creekbed. To Rosanna’s horror, he joins the Democratic party.
Frank comes of age just as World War II starts. His skill as a marksman, cultivated shooting rabbits for family dinners, turns to more sinister prey. Upon his return from Europe, Frank, his sister Lillian, and their respective spouses will personify the baby boomer era, as they eagerly pursue postwar amenities: appliance-filled suburban homes, gleaming American cars, fur coats. In Iowa, Walter and Rosanna are bemused but pleased by their offspring’s success.
At 416 pages, Some Luck is sweeping, bold, and completely engrossing. Toward the novel’s close, Rosanna prepares a Thanksgiving dinner for 23 people. Exhausted, the Langdon matriarch stands at the table, surveying her children, their spouses, the tumble of grandchildren. Her eyes meet Walter’s. They exhange a private glance: here we are. Look what we’ve created. It’s a lovely scene, as unadorned as the farmhouse it happens within. It takes a Jane Smiley to pull that off.
Some Luck may be understated, but it moves swiftly, keeping the reader turning the pages. Smiley’s reach is wide and assured. Few authors are able to write equally well about war strategy, communism, cover crops, and postpartum depression. Smiley can, and does, such that when Some Luck closes it feels sudden, despite the novel’s length. The reader isn’t ready to leave the Langdons behind. Take consolation in knowing there is more to come: Some Luck is the first installment of a promised trilogy. In this case, the luck is all ours.