Early Warning by Jane Smiley review – hobbled by the calendar

The author’s decision to devote a chapter to each year in this Iowan family drama spanning a century seems even more ill-conceived in the trilogy’s second volume

Jane Smiley: a bit too fascinated by grandchildren? Photograph: Peter Dasilva/Polaris

Kate Kellaway

Sunday 3 May 2015  - The Observer

It is interesting when a novelist of stature – Smiley is one of America’s greatest living writers, a Pulitzer prize-winning virtuoso, with each of her novels reading like a new departure – produces two books that seem to be suffering from a colossal power failure, as though written to kill time. And in a sense, killing time is what her new trilogy is about. The books span a century, with each year getting a chapter to itself. This is the story of the Langdons, a farming family in Iowa. We meet Walter and Rosanna and their five children in the first volume, Some Luck (1920-1953), and observe in the second, Early Warning (1953-1986), the slow-growing family tree branch out. The third volume, Golden Age, is still to come.

Smiley’s contemporary, Marilynne Robinson, in her painstaking Iowan trilogy (its last part, Lila, was published last year), makes a virtue of slowness. She controls time. For Smiley, time controls narrative. Hers is an ambitious marathon and a hugely miscalculated contrivance. The requirements of the calendar restrict the development of drama and do her imagination no favours. As we plough on through the years (in Iowa there is a lot of ploughing), we are kept conscientiously updated on the key events and people in each year: the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam war, the advent of Aids – each ticked off while Smiley’s characters struggle to signify.

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