Books: Patience brings its rewards

Jane Smiley has an unhurried, almost majestic pace of writing. Photo / Derek Shapton

Back in the familiar rural midwest of her previous novels, Moo, Horse Heaven and A Thousand Acres, Pulitzer prize-winner Jane Smiley presents us with the first volume of a projected trilogy.

Some Luck is an epic to be read with a degree of patience, with no urgency or desire for anything other than the slow unfolding of the Langdon family fortunes.

The Langdons are farmers in Iowa. We first meet them in 1920 and depart finally in 1953. Drought, the Depression, World War II, women's liberation, improved medicines, new crops and farming methods - the changing greater world spins around the smaller Langdon lives, which are depicted with occasionally exhaustive domestic and agricultural detail.

Characters verge on the stereotypical - the hardworking, taciturn but loving farmer (Walter), his long-suffering, gentle and equally hardworking wife (Rosanna), and two oldest sons, one of whom is soft-hearted and easily led, the other tough and dripping machismo.

There are Rosanna's constant pregnancies, a spirited aunt who has run away to Chicago and madly loves a gangster, old friends and various relatives who till poor farms nearby.

Smiley's technique is to visit the family, dropping in on them year by year, so readers can discover for themselves who has died, who has been born, who has gone away, who has returned or arrived afresh. Each following chapter forms a snapshot of the succeeding year, written in a clear, unpretentious style.

Smiley is a writer of considerable power, not the least for her unhurried, almost majestic pacing. There is a sense of the writer allowing herself to take her time, and not only because of the prospect of the second and third parts of the trilogy to come.

If her research occasionally jars by popping its head above the narrative, her respect and love for her characters draws us back into the story's web. The descriptions of the multitudes of children as they reach various stages of development are likely to warm the hearts of readers, particularly of mothers. They are often amusing and profound. Walter and Rosanna's maturing marriage and her crises of religious faith are skilfully handled.

Most readers will finish Some Luck lulled, comforted, entertained and most likely looking forward to the second volume, Early Warning, to be published in April.

Some Luck
by Jane Smiley
(Macmillan $34.99)

Stephanie Johnson is an Auckland writer.