Trilogy and John Updike's Rabbit quartet. In its sweeping scope, Smiley's saga recalls Balzac's 'Human Comedy,' John Dos Passos' U.S.A. But as Smiley continues her year-by-year march - remarkably, never a slog - through the 20th century, we're pulled into her characters' absorbing dramas. All this would be difficult to make sense of without having read Some Luck. Smiley throws a lot at us in the opening chapters as she jumps to a college campus in Iowa City, a tarmac in Iran, a children's birthday party in Maryland, and the newly expanded family farm in Denby, Iowa. Walter's funeral brings many of them together, making for not just the 'riot of floral exuberance' Smiley hails in the book's first line, but a riot of human exuberance, too. Even with the helpful Langdon family tree (which doesn't include birth and death dates, presumably to preserve narrative suspense), it's a challenge to keep everyone straight. With the postwar baby boom, Smiley's cast proliferates exponentially and her focus broadens. This book is less about farming than its predecessor because all but one of Walter and his wife Rosanna's five adult children join the great migration to America's burgeoning cities.

Why? Because we were eager to follow up on the members of the Iowa farm family she introduced in Some Luck - while we still remembered all of them.Įarly Warning picks up where Some Luck left off, in 1953, with the funeral of the 58-year-old patriarch, Walter Langdon. It's a good thing we only had to wait six months for Early Warning, the second volume of Jane Smiley's ambitious Last Hundred Years trilogy. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Capturing an indelible period in America through the lens of richly drawn characters we come to know and love, Early Warning is an engrossing, beautifully told story of the challenges-and rich rewards-of family and home, even in the most turbulent of times' - provided by publisher.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Early Warning Author Jane Smiley As the country moves out of postwar optimism through the Cold War, the social and sexual revolutions of the 1960s and '70s, and then into the unprecedented wealth-for some-of the early '80s, the Langdon children will have children of their own: twin boys who are best friends and vicious rivals a girl whose rebellious spirit takes her to the notorious Peoples Temple in San Francisco and a golden boy who drops out of college to fight in Vietnam-leaving behind a secret legacy that will send shockwaves through the Langdon family into the next generation.

Only one will remain to work the land, while the others scatter to Washington, DC, California, and everywhere in between. with his wife had sustained their Iowa farm for three decades, has suddenly died, leaving their five children looking to the future. 'Early Warning opens in 1953 with the Langdons at a crossroads.

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