The trilogy will span a century and extend into the future, to the year 2020. “Some Luck” is meant to be the first of three books in “The Last Hundred Years Trilogy” and takes the reader from 1920 to 1953. The narrator doesn’t dwell on sensory details, but what little there is packs a punch: “pale-apricot stone buildings” and leaves that “were the brightest green in the world, maybe in the universe-flat and waxy and full of themselves.” But “Some Luck” is perhaps most successful on the level of structure-this may be a case where the premise of the book surpasses its content. The reader watches the characters grow up in remarkably believable ways and has the unique privilege of sometimes remembering things about a character that they don’t even recall themselves.Īt the sentence level as well, the book is elegantly written. The novel’s third-person narrative has access to the minds of all the main characters, young and old, and as babies they already have unique personalities. As one would expect from this author, “Some Luck” is peopled with interesting and varied characters who share complex relationships. Smiley is the author of many well-received books, most notably the novel “A Thousand Acres,” a modern retelling of King Lear for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. It’s hard to say whether these faults are unavoidable, but the final product is certainly compelling and original, enough so that readers who stick with the book will be rewarded. Unfortunately, the novel’s very success in this endeavor comes at a cost: in moving through history gradually while preserving a sense of history as a whole, the narrative winds up being boring and dispassionate at times.

Textbooks teach the problems of history, but Smiley’s novel aims to convey the full extent of the past’s relationship to the present and to the future, without which one is likely to underestimate the import of today’s problems. Of course, this is a fact one knows in theory, but to make someone truly grasp the concept and its implications is not a trivial undertaking.

Reading Jane Smiley’s new novel, “Some Luck,” one becomes increasingly aware of a simple truth about time: all of history was once the present, and the present will one day be history.

Some luck smiley