[title subtitle=”review: Anita Paddock”][/title]
by Jane Smiley
Alfred Knopf, Publisher, 395 pages:$2799
January is a good month to read Some Luck by Jane Smiley. It’s a long book, which is just the right kind for winter days when staying inside seems like the best thing to do. It is about a farm family in Denby, Iowa, the same area where Smiley’s book, A Thousand Acres, a Pulitzer Prize winner, took place, and it is the first installment in a planned trilogy.
The title comes from farmers’ belief that luck plays a big part in their lives. “If we have some luck, we’ll get rain tomorrow. With some luck, the price of wheat won’t drop. With some luck, the baby will grow up tall and strong.”
This book centers around Rosanna and Walter Langdon who both grew up on farms near each other. The novel opens in 1920 after twenty-five-year-old Walter returns from his European service in World War I. He owns his own land, and even though his two-story farmhouse’s walls are so thin you can practically see through them, it is his and Rosanna’s home, and they don’t have to live with his father, a prosperous farmer who is free with his opinions.
Their firstborn son, Frank, is five months old when the story opens and, in a way I don’t recall seeing before in a novel, he, through his thoughts and his perspective, describes his father and mother. (The author gives each of the children in this novel their own scenes, in their own voices.) Frank tells us his father is tall and his face is rough; his voice is loud and his teeth are big and he smells like the animals in the barn. When his hands are around him, Frank feels trapped rather than comforted. But when his mother’s soft blonde hair falls over her beautiful face, and she calls him her darling boy, he is happy.
At Frank’s first birthday party, we meet other members of his family, and he listens to his maternal and paternal grandparents talk about their lives that revolve around their farms and the luck they hope will come their way.
Each chapter represents another year in the Langdons’ lives. More babies are born into the family, and their parents work hard to teach them the values they hold dear. Historical events like the Great Depression and the election of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal shape them and test their strength. The novel continues through the early 1950s, a time when the world is facing great social and economic change. All through the book, Smiley addresses these changes while chronicling the daily rhythms of life, the uncertainty of it all, and the accidents of fate.
The domestic aspects of life on a farm remind me of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books my children and I enjoyed. Some Luck deals with the same descriptions of farm life and those who live there. This is the perfect book to transport you to a different time, to see inside a family’s life and hear their stories, and it’s told perfectly by one of the greatest writers alive today.
