Monday, May 04, 2015

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

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