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 character being assembled in something that feels like real time.įrankie - Frank, as he's later called - is one of the most fascinating and complex characters in recent fiction. Much of the first half of Some Luck is concerned with the minute-by-minute 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 several other siblings. Part of that modesty is grounded in Smiley's remarkable patience. 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.

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 - including heightened vulnerability to the vagaries of weather and shifting markets and prices for beef, pork, eggs, corn, oats and other agricultural products - but expands with the Langdon diaspora to various American cities and beyond. And in terms of historical sweep and diversity of setting, Smiley's tale already outdistances Updike's. Some Luck (Knopf) is the auspicious beginning of what promises to be an American saga every bit as ambitious as Updike's magnum opus. That said, it seems reasonable to expect an abundant harvest. 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. We don't yet know how the story will develop or how it will end. Unlike, say, John Updike's celebrated Rabbit Angstrom series, which unfolded in four stand-alone novels set roughly a decade apart, Smiley's project is a single flowing narrative. 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.

Some luck smiley