There's schooling in Chicago and at Iowa State (and the University of Iowa, where one son, Henry, studies medieval literature and language, much like Smiley herself), the drought and the Depression as felt on a farm, experiments in munitions and fertilizer, the war in Italy and France, the Red Scare and the Soviet threat, and plenty on learning about farming, homemaking, love and work - even a little on spying, horse racing and real estate. Through vignettes focusing on alternate members of the family - Walter and Rosanna, their many children as they appear and mature and start families of their own, and Rosanna's sister, Eloise - the book takes us through major events and developments of the first half of the 20th century as intimate moments and individual experiences and observations.

This new novel, the first in a projected trilogy, brings these strains together to make of Smiley's Balzacian project - which has traveled across the country's generations, geography and milieus - the saga of the American family sprung from immigrant stock rooted in rich Iowa farmland.īeginning in 1920 and proceeding through yearly chapters to 1953, 'Some Luck' follows the family that starts with the marriage of Walter Langdon ('a bastard mix, as his grandfather would say') and Rosanna, product of Augsbergers and Vogels (blonde, but so slender and perfectly graceful, 'you didn't think she'd been raised on a farm, had farms all through her background, even in Germany'). Another persistent interest of Smiley's, made explicit in her novel 'The Greenlanders' and her preface to 'The Sagas of the Icelanders,' is the Norse saga, her long-ago subject of study at the University of Iowa. Midwestern farm country has proved fertile soil for fiction writers, and no one, perhaps, has cultivated it to such fine effect as Jane Smiley, in works ranging from her Pulitzer-Prize-winning 'A Thousand Acres' to 'Moo,' her comedy of agricultural academia.

Some luck smiley