Golden Age

August 3, 2015
A lot can happen over a hundred years, as Smiley shows in her chronicle of the Langdon family. The first two volumes, Some Luck and Early Warning, took the family from 1919 to 1986; Golden Age completes the trilogy by bringing them to the present, and beyond. As the book opens in 1987, family members are back at the Iowa farmstead to meet a new addition to the clan, a child whose existence was long hidden. But in some ways the bigger event that year is the stock market crash, from which the perpetually angry Michael (son of cold warrior Frank, grandson of farmer Walter) emerges wealthy. The first generation of Langdons survived drought and the Depression, the next prospered in the postwar boom, but now money takes center stage, moving faster and less traceably, enriching some and bankrupting others. The title, readers come to suspect, is an ironic reference to the Gilded Age, another era of boom, bust, and shady dealings; any golden glow is gone when Smiley moves into the future to complete the trilogy’s century span. Unfortunately, 2016 to 2019 feels bare-bones dystopian—less water, more violence. What lingers with readers aren’t the encounters with marquee historical events (Clinton’s sex scandals; 9/11) but Smiley’s detailed depiction of the kaleidoscopic geometries of family, as the Langdons spiral out from Iowa into the larger world, endlessly fracturing and coming back together.

August 1, 2015
The title is decidedly sardonic, given the number of deaths and disasters Smiley inflicts on the Langdon family and kin in the final volume of her Last Hundred Years trilogy (Early Warning, 2015, etc.).Nonetheless, "golden age" seems appropriate for the late-life reconciliation of Frank and Andy Langdon; it's warmly affecting to see the remoteness Andy cultivated over decades of neglect slowly fade as Frank actually shares himself with her-until he's struck by lightning at age 74. Several of his siblings meet less spectacular deaths as the story progresses year by year from 1987 through an imagined 2019, but autumnal musings by the survivors get no more space from this briskly unsentimental author than the maneuvers of the younger generations (a few of whom are somewhat schematically dispatched on 9/11 or scarred for life in the Iraq War). Frank and Andy's son Michael remains as toxic as ever, engaging in ever shadier financial deals that make him one of many villains in the 2008 economic meltdown; his identical twin, Richie, strives to get some distance with a political career but can never entirely disengage from Michael's emotional force field. Their cousin Jesse, who inherited the family farm in Iowa, grapples with the havoc wrought by Monsanto's genetically altered seeds, the impact of climate change on his crops, and the perennial financial insecurity of farmers, always in debt and vulnerable to predatory speculators like Michael. Newly introduced characters like Charlie (hitherto unknown son of a Langdon killed in Vietnam in Early Warning) and his girlfriend, Riley, militant political conscience of her boss, Richie, are welcome additions to Smiley's vibrant gallery of fully fleshed characters, with Henry and Claire remaining the most ruefully appealing of the siblings we first met in Some Luck. The final chapters, which look a scant four years ahead and see nothing but ecological and political bad news, are almost comically bleak-let's hope Smiley isn't as skilled a fortuneteller as she is a storyteller. Despite all the dire events, the narrative energy of masterfully interwoven plotlines always conveys a sense of life as an adventure worth pursuing.

COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from September 1, 2015
With Golden Age, Smiley grandly concludes her Last Hundred Years trilogy, a multigenerational saga about the Langdons, an Iowa farm family. The story began in 1920 in Some Luck (2014), reached 1986 in Early Warning (2015), and stretches into the very near future in the final installment. In each novel, Smiley has subtly yet pointedly linked forces political, technological, financial, and social to personal lives, tracing in the most organic, unobtrusive, yet clarifying manner the enormous changes that have taken place during the last century. On the farming front, Jesse, the next in line following Walter and Joe, has been running the farm more scientifically than intuitively, with one eye on his computer, and now finds himself shackled with debt and trapped into using genetically modified seeds and environmentally deleterious pesticides. To farm is to live at the mercy of weather, and Smiley is a passionate observer of sun and storms, a theme made exponentially more dire by global warming as Iowa withers in a drought, and Yellowstone burns. Another ongoing theme brought to new depths here is the ripple effect of war. Jesse and Jen's son, Guthrie, serves in Iraq, then returns home physically intact but psychically injured. Smiley does revel in the blissfulness of being, celebrating the glory of horses, the good company of dogs, the sweet astonishment of quickening life and newborn babies, the sheltering intimacy of a loving marriage, the pleasure of solitude. She wryly tracks the slow march toward gender equality through the experiences of the Langdon girls and women, including free-spirited Felicity, who, after realizing that her first passion, the veterinary profession, is not right for her, joins the Occupy movement. As she introduces new faces, Smiley extends the lives of characters readers have become involved with, including Chicago-based history professor Henry, whose ex-lover, Philip, has died of AIDs, and the now happily liberated Claire. Heretofore vaporous Andy turns elegantly steely as her and Frank's diametrically and, ultimately, catastrophically opposed twins achieve fame and notoriety when Richie becomes a U.S. congressman and Michael grows obscenely rich and malevolent as a monster of Wall Street . Smiley sustains an enthralling narrative velocity and buoyancy, punctuated with ricocheting dialogue, as she creates a spectacular amplitude of characters, emotions, and events. Sensuousness, dread, recognition, shock, sorrow, mischievous humor, revelation, empathyall are generated by Smiley's fluid, precisely calibrated prose, abiding connection to the terrain she maps, fascination with her characters, and command of the nuances of their predicaments. Each novel is a whole and vital world in its own right, and together the three stand as a veritable cosmos as Smiley makes brilliant use of the literary trilogy. The ideal form for encompassing the breadth and depth of our brash, glorious, flawed, precious country, it has inspired many significant American writers. A nation violently riven by the Civil War catalyzed Louisa May Alcott's New Englandset March trilogy: Little Women, Little Men, Jo's Boys. Booth Tarkington follows several generations of a midwestern family in the Growth trilogy: The Turmoil, The Magnificent Ambersons, National Avenue. Theodore Dreiser's Trilogy of DesireThe Financier, The Titan, The Stoicfeatures Frank Cowperwood, a fictional version of a real-life Chicago streetcar tycoon. E. L. Doctorow described John Dos Passos' 1930s U.S.A. trilogyThe 42nd Parallel, 1919, The Big Moneyas vaultingly ambitious. Louis Terkel became Studs thanks to James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy: Young Lonigan, The...

September 15, 2015

Centering on the strained relationships and dissolved marriages of the children of family pillar Frank Langdon, this final volume in Smiley's "Last Hundred Years" trilogy, (after Some Luck and Early Warning) follows Richie's volatile political career in Washington, DC; Michael's reckless financial scams in New York; and Janet in California, slowly growing distant from her family. This time, the years span 1987 to 2019, with the family farm in Iowa falling victim to foreclosure and Smiley predicting the Langdons' reactions to political events in the years to come. Spotlighted are the intricate relationships among cousins, whose stories weave in and out while moving between California and New York, and Chicago and Washington, DC. The appearance and departure of the surprise family member, Charlie, feels abrupt, as if placed there to add additional drama to an already detailed work. Smiley is most successful in relaying historical fiction; chapters set in the future often seem extraneous. Yet the boon of Smiley's writing is her unforgettable characters and unexpected relationships, such as the bond between siblings Henry and Claire in their later years and the friendship between cousins Emily and Chase, even as their parents remain estranged. VERDICT A fitting conclusion to the trilogy, leaving readers wondering what the future holds in store for the once united but now far-flung family. [See Prepub Alert, 4/6/15.]--Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2015

Smiley wraps up her "Last Hundred Years" trilogy, begun last year with Some Luck and continuing with this spring's Early Warning, as she arcs through the history of America in the 20th century and beyond (the book ends in 2019) by unfolding the story of the Langdon family. The narrative opens in 1987, as Frank's twin sons show their competitive edge on Wall Street and in politics, and moves on to 9/11, witnessed by Charlie, a surprise character encountered in the second book. Sadly, the family homestead in Iowa is heading for collapse.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.