In an age of literary pyrotechnics, unreliable narrators and blurred genres,
Jane Smiley has written a ravishing and defiantly old-fashioned novel
set on the same Iowa soil she tilled in her Pulitzer
Prize–winning A Thousand Acres. Some
Luck (Knopf), the first book in a three-volume
series, chronicles one family's triumphs and travails as they work to
wrest a living from their farm.
Opening in 1920, the
novel tracks the fates of Walter and Rosanna Langdon and their children
over three decades. Frank, the firstborn, grows into a brilliant,
brashly seductive man who seeks wartime adventure in Africa and Europe
and eventually settles into an uneasy domesticity on Long Island. Joe,
an animal lover, remains with his parents on the farm. The angelic
middle child, Lillian, marries a secretive suitor who whisks her off to
Washington, D.C., while the two youngest, bookish Henry and practical
Claire, balance their own aspirations against chores and obligations.
And all the while, Walter and Rosanna's union endures, roiled by doubt
at times yet rooted in a bone-deep connection.
Reminiscent of the work of Willa Cather and Alice
Munro, Some Luck ingeniously spirals outward from the
Langdon farm and back again, capturing the arc of personal and
historical change in forthright prose that unexpectedly takes flight.
— Hamilton Cain
