She does not neglect the radical movements that flourished in the Midwest: Rosanna’s sister Eloise marries a communist, moves to Chicago, takes a Trotskyite line and follows news of Stalin with mounting dismay. Smiley suggests the culture’s small-mindedness and bigotry along with its generosity and sacrifice.

Even in good years, buyers offer precious little money for their crops.

The Langdons are spared the Depression’s worst weather, but wells dry up and neighbors flee. The boys and their younger siblings are indoctrinated in the virtues of work from an early age and enchanted by their one-room school. It’s no surprise that Frank is a merciless bully to the next in line, Joe, who is quickly pegged the whiner of the family. He touches everything he’s been forbidden to touch: His father repeatedly takes an ineffective strap to him, as generations of American fathers have done. The eldest child, Frank, has movie-star looks, a singing voice to match and a quick mind. The family members’ fortunes mirror the fortunes of the nation, with allowances for personality and luck. The Langdons both come from farming stock - his English, hers German - and know constant work, much of it described here with the precise attention that grants labor its own grace. Walter’s life is his farm and his family. It’s 1920, and Walter, recently home from World War I, contemplates his first-born son and his “perfectly graceful” young wife, Rosanna.

The story opens with the patriarch, Walter Langdon, walking his Iowa farm. Smiley gives all the family members their own scenes. Her no-muss, no-fuss storytelling, if unsurprising, is also frequently subtle, wry and moving.Īmong her many novels, Smiley has written a powerful chronicle of Midwestern farm life in her Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Thousand Acres” and a clever satire of academic life at an agricultural studies university, “Moo.” “ Some Luck” explores many more characters and a far longer stretch of time - hence its structure, tidy as a well-planted cornfield, one chapter devoted to each year from 1920 to 1953. Smiley delivers a straightforward, old-fashioned tale of rural family life in changing times. Over the course of the novel - already longlisted for the National Book Award - most of the children will leave the farm just as surely as the rest of the white rural Midwest will pack its bags. “ Some Luck ,” the engaging first volume of Jane Smiley’s planned trilogy, is a sweeping story that spans 33 years, three continents and a generation of children on an Iowa farm.

Some luck book