Early Warning

January 26, 2015
Smiley has a big cast to wrangle in the second volume of the Last Hundred Years trilogy, which began with 2014’s Some Luck, and she starts this entry at the funeral of Walter, the Iowa farmer and paterfamilias of volume one. While the Langdons, scattered across New York, Chicago, and California, reunite, readers get a refresher on the family relationships. Covering 1953 to 1986 at a clip of one year per chapter, the focus here is the Cold War and its fallout. This material occasionally feels like the greatest hits of the post-WWII era, with Langdons brushing up against a Kennedy assassination, Jonestown, and Vietnam. And since the post-war baby boom means cousins by the dozens, the cast of characters isn’t as vivid and particular as it was in the knock-out first volume. Still, Smiley keeps you reading; as a writer she is less concerned about individual characters, but still as deft as ever at conveying the ways in which a family develops: some stories carrying on, while others fall away. This isn’t a series you can start in the middle, so pick up Some Luck, ride out the Depression and WWII with Walter, Rosanna, and Frank, then come back to the atom-and-adultery-haunted volume two.

Smiley's outstanding new novel, second in a trilogy, is a panoramic story of twentieth-century America experienced through generations of an Iowa farm family. It cries out for a narrator with a finely tuned ear for different regional voices and a knack for distinguishing this large cast of characters one from another, especially since the listener lacks the printed family tree the hard copy provides. The fine comic actor Lorelei King is, alas, miscast here. Characters from East Coast to West all speak with King's own non-standard pronunciation, and she gives her sentences a dozy rhythm, with a habitual breathy softening of the last word in a phrase or sentence that smothers the author's meaning. This ambitious and impressive book deserves better. B.G. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine