Smiley’s trilogy ends on high note

“Golden Age” by Jane Smiley (Knopf, 443 pages, $26.95 )

With this final volume, Smiley’s Last Hundred Years trilogy is now complete, and it is a major accomplishment.

The first volume, “Some Luck” (2014), narrates the exploits of the Langdon family from 1920 to 1953, with each chapter focusing on one year. “Early Warning,” the second volume, published earlier this year, continues with the same format, moving from 1953 to 1986.

“Golden Age” begins in 1987 and ends at five minutes before midnight on Dec. 31, 2019.

The tidiness of the numbers belie the complexity and messiness of the lives of her characters. Her narrative also touches on many themes and explores a variety of emotions.

Amid the joy and heartache, the successes and failures, the acts of kindness and of meanness, one theme rises above the others: that life in all its beauty and ugliness passes by too quickly. And often, like good fiction, it surprises us.

While other, more popular sagas dwell on major events, Smiley’s is a more psychological narrative. While many things happen, it is the movement of her characters’ inner lives that matters most.

She references her title toward the end when an aunt and her niece are looking back over their lives. The niece asks her aunt if she thinks they’ve lived through a golden age. The aunt decides that “all golden ages were discovered within.” She thinks of mundane details of her life—“her father, Carl, the endless Iowa horizon, a pan of shortbread emerging from the oven, and her grandchildren laughing in the next room”—and decides these had made her life a golden age.

A major challenge in a work with nearly 100 characters – even a work of over 1,300 pages – is creating depth and complexity in those characters. This is perhaps Smiley’s greatest accomplishment.

Although she doesn’t write at length about every character, she does involve most, and she uses incisive psychological insight to reveal each one.

Minnie, unmarried, sits with her young niece Felicity and observes that age two “was the most ephemeral age, the age of incipient consciousness, when personality was first chinking into place,” and she decides to enjoy her time with her.

Claire observes that “mothers were very hard for daughters to understand; one of the nice things about sons was that they didn’t even try.”

While the women in the novel are more aware of their emotions, the men certainly betray theirs and act on them. And in such a large story, we get a variety of actions and emotions.

Guthrie, an Iraq War veteran observes that “one of the effects of PTSD was not that you were suicidal, exactly, but that death was such a familiar concept that it seemed like a reasonable alternative to, not fear, but shock, suddenness, the unexpected.”

Throughout the trilogy, Smiley demonstrates knowledge of a wide variety of subjects: horses, farming, the Iraq War, politics, trading.

One of the characters becomes a Congressman. He discovers “a side effect of the congressional lifestyle – not perennial youth but perennial immaturity.” In her acknowledgments, Smiley writes: “I would like to thank the members of the U.S. Congress for being so easy to satirize.”

Smiley touches on many major events in the course of telling the stories of her characters. She then takes the risk of moving her story into the future. It’s not a pleasant one. Ecological damage has left much of South Dakota looking like a moonscape.

In many places – including Washington state, Kansas, Wisconsin and Oklahoma – “the economy has simply vanished these last years,” and gangs of youth rob and murder people.

A police officer tells the former Congressman that “domestic violence was no longer investigated, as a policy to save money.”

On the other hand, in a city market, people can eat organic pulled-pork sandwiches, “and on your ticket was the name of the hog you were eating.”

All these characters have sprung from Walter and Rosanna Langdon and their Iowa farm. And that farm and its demise form a major part of the trilogy’s tragedy. At the end of the story, that couple’s great-granddaughter Felicity and her husband visit the farm, now run by a huge corporation. They measure the depth of the soil, which is now two inches. “It was twelve or fourteen a hundred and fifty years ago,” says Felicity. Her husband says, “It took the Mesopotamians thousands of years to destroy their soil base.”

Smiley’s project ends with an intimate look at human love and poses the question of whether or how the human species will survive. The Last Hundred Years trilogy is a great achievement. It is also a work that both brings us pleasure and leads us to ponder great questions.

This story was originally published December 17, 2015 at 10:06 AM with the headline "Smiley’s trilogy ends on high note."