Some Luck: A Novel

“Yes, Some Luck may read like the slow drip of a farmhouse faucet. Yup. Let’s say you say that. Just get a bucket under it, and let it accumulate. And then you may have something.”

Over the course of a full writing career, which includes an early Pulitzer (A Thousand Acres, 1991), Jane Smiley has unquestionably learned every little corner of her craft.  She was an influential prof at the center of the American fiction-writing universe, the University of Iowa. Her method now is to get things right and get out of the way, expertly putting you into a trance of the quotidian.

Years ago, in books like the academic wit-fest Moo, she indulged in set pieces of cleverness, writing perfect satirical paragraphs about frat boys, venal college administrators, harried, heroic adjuncts, and cynical townies. One sometimes felt that if she had been a faster typist, she might have fallen to the level of Tom Wolfe in I Am Charlotte Simmons.

Nowadays she spurns all that local, low-hanging fruit, all those slow-moving homegrown homecoming University of Iowa campus targets. As the midwestern saying goes,"Not my circus, not my monkeys."

In Some Luck, we spend a good deal of quality time with the Langdon family as their Iowa farm world carefully confronts and tentatively assimilates what the 20th century throws at them: telephones, tractors, disease, Catholics. It’s a world untouched and untouchable by modernism, in either manner or matter.  

It’s something of a relief to be able to report that the cast of characters will not astonish—it’s a big, various family--nor will any particular eventuality bring you to your knees as a reader. But it all feels right, whether we’re feeding rabbits and new calves and thinking about crops or being awakened by the crash of a Nazi vehicle. 

“Before the war, there were farmers who grew soybeans instead of oats—once they were up, you turned the cows out into the field, and they were pretty good pasture.  During the thirties, Walter hadn’t planted soybeans because he had always expected enough rain to grow the crops he preferred, especially oats.” 

“The moon had gone down, but against the pale hillside, they could make out what had happened pretty well—a car, a Kubelwagen, had missed the turn where the road angled sharply to the west, and gone over the edge, rolled, and landed on its top.”

This is handsome, sturdy writing, nothing fancy. There’s a state-of-the-art rectitude in Professor Smiley’s story-telling with regard to point of view: every word of the third-person narration is clearly associable with some character’s line of thought and the language therefore hews pretty close to those worthy, self-limited mentalities. Here’s the set-up to the first joke, forty pages in:

“[Eloise] had no talent for sewing, so Rosanna had made her two nice dresses and a coat. Three years and she would be married, no doubt, to one of these boys who were now wolfing down his sweet corn, and what would they do then?

“Rosanna said that Walter was a worrier, but there was plenty to worry about with prices so low. You may say that hogs paid the bills, or chickens and eggs and cream. There was a fellow down by Ames who bred draft horses and sent them back to Europe by ship, since so many horses had been killed in the war that they’d lost even their breeding stock, but the thing that made Walter nervous . . . was the length of the supply line. Let’s say that every hundred miles some other person got a right to take a nip of the cherry. Let’s say that. Then, if you were sending your corn and oats and hogs and beef to Sioux City, well, that was two hundred miles, and Kansas City was 250. Chicago was about 325 or so, and beyond that Walter wasn’t willing to go. You could just say that the quarters got thinner or the dollars got paler the farther they came—that was how Walter thought about it. So sending draft horses to France and Germany? That was a strange business, like wheat to Australia. Walter didn’t trust it. The wealth was right here, spreading away from this table---chickens in the chicken house, corn in the field, cows in the barn, pigs in the sty, Rosanna in the kitchen with Joe and Frank, Eloise safe in her room thinking her thoughts.  Walter looked around. His work crew was revived now, and making jokes—did you hear about the farmer who won the lottery? As if there were lotteries anymore. When they asked him what he was going to do with his million dollars, reported Theo Whitehead, he said, Well, I guess I’ll just farm till it’s gone.”

It doesn’t seem to strike Walter as particularly funny, for the next thing he thinks is “Too much oats. Too much oats.” Maybe the joke’s basis, the unprofitability of farms, is too dark for him. But as a narrative practice, it’s state of the art: never have a character laugh at a joke. In handling wit this way, Smiley has disappeared beautifully; her prose is like a movie filmed in natural light.

The slow music of the symphony of life is what Updike said, witty Mozartian figurist though he was (he was probably just justifying his approach in the Rabbit novels, the perspective from the baffled, mostly dim b-baller) and Smiley’s Iowa eases along through the decades like blown grass in a Terrence Malick movie.

What is true, reliable, durable—these are the valuables in this novel, and promise to be in the two promised sequels. My guess is that at least one of those will follow Rosanna’s and Walter’s bookish son Henry, finally giving Smiley more of an excuse to be verbally brilliant again. 

In Some Luck, it is the assemblage of characters that matters, and whether one serves them well. Surely Smiley knew that she would be likened to Rosanna, the family’s humble convener and servitor:

“She could not have created this moment, these lovely faces, these candles flickering, the flash of silverware, the fragrance of the food hanging over the table, the heads turning this way and that, the voices murmuring and laughing. . . . Something had created itself from nothing—a dumpy old house had been full, if only for the moment, with twenty-three different worlds, each one of them rich and mysterious. Rosanna wrapped her arms around herself for a moment and sat down.”      

Yes, Some Luck may read like the slow drip of a farmhouse faucet. Yup. Let’s say you say that. Just get a good bucket under it, and let it accumulate. And then you may have something.