Jane Smiley’s new novel unfolds long narrative about farm family

“Some Luck” by Jane Smiley (Knopf, 395 pages, $26.95)

Jane Smiley’s 14th novel is the first volume of “The First Hundred Years Trilogy,” a family saga that shows off Smiley’s storytelling skills.

“Some Luck” begins in 1920 and follows the lives of the Langdon family through 1953, with each chapter focusing on one year.

Walter and Rosanna Vogel Langdon live on an Iowa farm that is heavily in debt. Walter has survived World War I and the flu outbreak. Their parents and one grandmother live nearby.

Smiley carefully plots her story, moving with an omniscient voice among the various characters, even babies and toddlers. She fills the narrative with details that reflect the time of the story. Rosanna sees her first “Band-Aid.” We learn about food they eat, what they wear, the one-room school the children attend. We get details about their work, including castrating lambs and docking their tails.

At first the reader looks for the point of the story. But soon we settle into the long narrative as these characters’ lives unfold. There is no one defining event, no specific theme that dominates. The story is the point.

Smiley delineates well each character, so that we don’t confuse one with another. Each has specific traits, looks, moods and perspectives.

We also gain insight into societal traits of that time and place. A month or two after Walter and Rosanna’s young daughter is killed in an accident, Rosanna “had garnered massive praise for not succumbing to her grief, but how could you do that on a farm?”

The family’s minor travails and successes are set against larger historical changes, including the Great Depression and World War II. As the Langdon children grow up, some move away from their small Iowa community and head out into the broader world.

Oldest son Frank, one of the more interesting characters, fights in Africa and Europe during World War II. He will likely be a major player in the second book of the trilogy, which will run up to 2020.

Smiley’s narrative voice rings true for the most part. At times, however, she slips into cliche, such as when a minister prays: “O Lord, preserve your children from the Jews in Hollywood who infest our world with evil thoughts of bodies and carnality, bare legs and heaving bosoms.”

In “Some Luck,” Smiley has created a world that captures our attention, then our interest, then our emotions as we follow these fictional lives.

At a Thanksgiving dinner, Rosanna reflects on how “a dumpy old house had been filled, if only for this moment, with twenty-three different worlds, each of them rich and mysterious.”

Smiley shows us how each life, no matter how apparently mundane, is really rich and mysterious.

This story was originally published November 29, 2014 at 6:15 PM with the headline "Jane Smiley’s new novel unfolds long narrative about farm family."