Their first child, Frank, is followed by Joe and Mary Elizabeth and three others. A Methodist, he has just married Rosanna Vogel, a Roman Catholic, and set up on a small farm in his hometown, Denby, Iowa. Walter Langdon, 25, is a patriarch in the making. Many of the characters named in a family tree at the front of the book amble onstage, one after another. “Some Luck” is made up of 34 brief chapters, each marked at the start with a year, from 1920 to 1953, so the chapters line up like hash marks on a timeline or headstones in a graveyard. It’s a family novel, like Anne Tyler’s “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant,” which Smiley has called the “serious though not overly sober narrative of the life of a particular family whose members consider themselves ordinary” - a novel where “things go on as they begin.” And it’s a book, like her own “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel,” in which her brilliance and energy can’t dispel the impression that this isn’t an alive-and-kicking literary work so much as a project, a personal challenge.Īs projects go, it’s very skillfully conceived, an elegant solution to the historical novelist’s problem of how to raise the big barn that is the past without relying too much on power tools or hired help. “Some Luck” is written, as Smiley observes of Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities,” about the generation of the author’s grandparents.

So it’s appropriate to turn to “Some Luck” - the first novel in a projected trilogy about Iowa farm people and their descendants - by way of Smiley’s critical insights. With a whistle-stop tour of 100 novels (“Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel”), she lined up with Henry James and John Updike as a writer who offsets her own fiction with spot-on commentary about other people’s work. With a short biography of Dickens, she invited us to see her, like him, as a writer whose work is defined by its energy and range rather than its settings and subject matter.

While Robinson was writing “Gilead,” her own Pulitzer winner, and two subsequent novels about Iowa church people and their descendants, Smiley was shaking off the Heartland-Author tag with novels about real estate and tax evasion (“Good Faith”), Hollywood (“Ten Days in the Hills”) and a military wife transplanted from Missouri to San Francisco (“Private Life”). While Robinson, already revered as the author of “Housekeeping,” was taking a long pause from publishing to teach at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Smiley wrote “A Thousand Acres,” a story of an Iowa farm family in extremis that won the Pulitzer Prize. Before Marilynne Robinson’s Iowa, there was Jane Smiley’s.

Some luck book