For Her First Trilogy, Jane Smiley Returns To Iowa, 'Where The Roots Are'
"This is worlds in collision," Smiley says. "These are things that were fascinating at the time: You thought you were in this one place and this was true, and then you got on the train and went a few hundred miles away and everything was different and other things were true. And yet, that's the thing that our parents — that's what they discovered because they went out into the world. That was part of the job that that generation did."
That change is accelerated by World War II. Frank's younger brother, Joe, gets a deferment to stay on the farm while Frank goes overseas to fight.
"And there are other wars, obviously, as we go through volume two and volume three," Smiley says. "There are other wars and other generations have to deal with them. So that was another interesting thing for me, was to send these boys off to various wars and see what happened to them."
As part one of the trilogy draws to a close, some members of the Langdon family are still on the farm while others are spread across the country. Toward the end of the book, they all come together on the farm to celebrate Thanksgiving:
As if on cue, Walter turned from Andrea and looked at Rosanna, and they agreed in that instant: something had created itself from nothing — a dumpy old house had been filled, if only for this 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.
A 21st-Century Writer With 19th-Century Style
Smiley has been compared to some of the great writers of the 19th century, when the novel was a flourishing art form. She says those are the authors she grew up reading and their books remain among her favorites.
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"I love their sort of openness, their accessibility and their willingness to engage with the socioeconomic world around them," she says. "And, you know, [Charles] Dickens did it in his way and [Anthony] Trollope did it in his way and [Jane] Austen did it in her way. And so I think it's great to be that kind of a novelist."
In that tradition, Smiley gives her trilogy the sweep of history. But what interests Smiley most is the way those historic events play out in the lives of one family whose roots are deeply embedded in the middle of America.
Read an excerpt of Some Luck