Publisher's Weekly Review
In the first volume of a planned trilogy, Smiley returns to the Iowa of her Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres, but in a very different vein. The warring sisters and abusive father of that book have given way to the Langdons, a loving family whose members, like most people, are exceptional only in their human particularities. The story covers the 1920s through the early '50s, years during which the family farm survives the Depression and drought, and the five Langdon children grow up and have to decide whether to stay or leave. Smiley is particularly good at depicting the world from the viewpoint of young children-all five of the Langdons are distinct individuals from their earliest days. The standout is oldest son Frank, born stubborn and with an eye for opportunity, but as Smiley shifts her attention from one character to another, they all come to feel like real and relatable people. The saga of an Iowa farm family might not seem like an exciting premise, but Smiley makes it just that, conjuring a world-time, place, people-and an engaging story that makes readers eager to know what happens next. Smiley plans to extend the tale of the Langdon family well into the 21st century; she's off to a very strong start. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Smiley (Private Life, 2010, etc.) follows an Iowa farm family through the thick of the 20th century. We first meet Walter Langdon in 1920 as he anxiously surveys his fields. Milk prices are down, and anyway "worry-shading-into-alarm [is] Walter's ever-present state," thinks wife Rosanna. The freakish accidental death of a toddler daughter is the only incident here that really justifies Walter's apprehensions (it wouldn't be a Smiley novel without at least one cruel twist of fate), but underpinning the comparatively placid unfolding of three decades is farm folks' knowledge that disaster is always one bad crop away, and luck is never to be relied on. (The sardonic folk tale "Lucky Hans" is retold several times.) The Langdons raise five children to varied destinies. Smart, charismatic Frank leaves home for college and the Army. Steady, sensitive Joe stays home on the farm, its perennial round of backbreaking labor somewhat alleviated by such innovations as tractors and commercial fertilizer. Golden girl Lillian marries a government employee who gets Frank involved in spying on suspected communist agents after the warironic, since Rosanna's sister Eloise is a Trotskyist. Times are changing: Henry, the family intellectual, will clearly end up in academia; Lillian and Frank are both living in Eastern suburbs. Youngest daughter Claire is less vivid than her siblings, and the names begin to blur a bit as the postwar baby boom creates a burgeoning new generation, but for the most part Smiley juggles characters and events with her customary aplomb and storytelling craft. The novel doesn't so much end as stop, adding to the sense that we've simply dropped in on a continuing saga. Smiley is the least sentimental of writers, but when Rosanna and Walter look at the 23 people gathered at Thanksgiving in 1948 and "agreed in an instant: something had created itself from nothing," it's a moment of honest sentiment, honestly earned. An expansive, episodic tale showing this generally flinty author in a mellow mood: surprising, but engaging. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Smiley was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand Acres (1991), a novel about a farming family in Iowa. In her fourteenth novel, she returns to that fertile ground to tell the stories of the Langdons, a clan deeply in accord with the land, wherever their quests lead them. A seductive writer in perfect command of every element of language, Smiley sets a ruminative pace embodying the tempo of farm work, season to season. Beginning in 1920 and reaching 1953, this saga of the vicissitudes of luck and our futile efforts to control it is also a richly meteorological novel, exploring how the high and low pressures of the mind can determine a farm's bounty and losses just as droughts and blizzards do. While steadfast Walter worries, his smart, industrious wife, Rosanna, runs the household and cares for their children, beginning with courageous Frankie, followed by animal-lover Joey, romantic Lillian, scholarly Henry, and good Claire. As barbed in her wit as ever, Smiley is also munificently tender. The Langdons endure the Depression, Walter agonizes over giving up his trusty horses for a tractor, and Joe tries the new synthetic fertilizers. Then, as Frank serves in WWII and, covertly, the Cold War, the novel's velocity, intensity, and wonder redouble. Smiley's grand, assured, quietly heroic, and affecting novel is a supremely nuanced portrait of a family spanning three pivotal American decades. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: With a major print run and extensive national author tour ramping up publicity, ever-popular Smiley's tremendous new novel will be on the top of countless to-read lists.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SOME LUCK, by Jane Smiley. (Anchor, $15.95.) Smiley returns to the familiar terrain of Iowa in this novel, the first in a trilogy. Its multi-generational story of a Midwestern farming family unfolds against the backdrop of American cultural and economic upheaval, spanning the time from before the Depression through the years after World War II. AMERICA'S BITTER PILL: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System, by Steven Brill. (Random House, $18.) Building off his reporting in Time magazine, Brill wades into the "treacherous" politics behind the Affordable Care Act. His sharp account traces the influence and competing interests of key players, and lends compassion to the discussion of health care, an issue "more urgent and more emotionally charged than any other." THE STAGER, by Susan Coll. (Picador, $16.) Eve, an out-of-work journalist, is now a "stager," tasked with redecorating houses for maximum salability. When she is hired to transform a sprawling Tudor, Eve realizes the mansion she is grooming belongs to her former best friend. Coil's acerbic novel is a portrait of family dysfunction: Its memorable characters include a former tennis champion, now obese and addicted to pills, and an embittered pet rabbit. DO NOT SELL AT ANY PRICE: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78 rpm Records, by Amanda Petrusich. (Scribner, $16.) When the author, a music journalist and critic, set out to find a rejoinder to the dominance of digital music, she encountered an insular cabal of collectors. At turns skeptical, reclusive and territorial, this "oddball fraternity" is fixated on acquiring the most impressive collection of 78 r.p.m. records, the often overlooked predecessors to the more familiar vinyl. The resulting book, peppered with portraits of the quirky collectors, is a meditation on "the rapture of discovery." F, by Daniel Kehlmann. Translated by Carol Brown Janeway. (Vintage, $15.95.) At a hypnotist's mysterious urging, a father abandons his wife and three sons to pursue a writing career. While he goes on to earn considerable literary success, his sons flounder: One becomes a faithless priest; another, a professional art forger; and the last, a fraudulent financier. Kehlmann's novel gives rise to questions about family and fortune. MY TWO ITALIES, by Joseph Luzzi. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $14.) Luzzi reflects on his Italian identity and the country's dualities in this bittersweet memoir. The son of immigrants from Calabria (a poor region far from the country's cultural centers) and a scholar of Italian literature, the author reconciles the contradictions of his place at the intersection of a divided Italy. LAST STORIES AND OTHER STORIES, by William T. Vollmann. (Penguin, $22.) Ghosts, love and eroticism commingle in these eerie, unsettling tales. Vollmann, Kate Bernheimer wrote here, is a "dreaming and lucid-eyed pilgrim," whose melancholic stories dwell on the aftermath of grief and trauma.