Smiley's farm trilogy promises bountiful harvest

It's difficult to pronounce anything like a definitive judgment on Some Luck, the first installment in a new trilogy of novels following an Iowa farm couple, Walter and Rosanna Langdon, and their ultimately far-flung offspring over an entire century beginning in 1920.

Unlike, say, John Updike's celebrated Rabbit Angstrom series, which unfolded in four stand-alone novels set roughly a decade apart, Smiley's project is a single flowing narrative. We don't yet know how the story will develop or how it will end. The second and third parts of the trilogy are scheduled to be published next year, and until then, we can't see how the narrative seeds the author has planted in this first volume will germinate and grow to maturity later on.

That said, it seems reasonable to expect an abundant harvest. Some Luck (Knopf, ***½ out of four) is the auspicious beginning of what promises to be an American saga every bit as ambitious as Updike's magnum opus. And in terms of historical sweep and diversity of setting, Smiley's tale already outdistances Updike's. While the Rabbit novels stayed snugly within a suburban context, Smiley's latest is anchored in the satisfactions and challenges of life on a farm — including heightened vulnerability to the vagaries of weather and shifting markets and prices for beef, pork, eggs, corn, oats and other agricultural products — but expands with the Langdon diaspora to various American cities and beyond.

The odd and perhaps miraculous thing about this almost ridiculously grandiose undertaking is how intimate it feels and, page by page, how little it announces itself as a masterpiece in the making.

Part of that modesty is grounded in Smiley's remarkable patience. Much of the first half of Some Luck is concerned with the minute-by-minute minutiae of the Langdon dynasty as it comes into being — beginning with the infancy of their first child, Frankie, soon followed by his brother Joey and several other siblings. The way Smiley gets deep inside these children's heads, articulating their thoughts before and after they have the language to articulate those thoughts, is a staggering literary feat in which we see human character being assembled in something that feels like real time.

Frankie — Frank, as he's later called — is one of the most fascinating and complex characters in recent fiction. Early on, he shows signs of iconoclastic stubbornness, unable to resist his passions even when they put him in danger of punishment. (Walter does not spare the rod.) He endlessly torments Joey, but develops a strong sense of injustice; his highly intelligent ways of dealing with bullies at school (one involving a mousetrap) presage his effectiveness as a leader in the Army during World War II and, later, as an unofficial counterintelligence agent during the early years of the Cold War. Smiley drops some hints that the matter of Frank's romantic and sexual life may hold some surprises to come, but we'll have to wait till next year to find out.

If there's a cause to worry a bit about the direction of the trilogy, it has to do with what we might call the logistics of epic historical novels. As the characters and subplots proliferate, it becomes harder for Smiley to maintain the same level of narrative momentum and intensity, chapter after chapter. And as the years zip by, with the characters caught up in one cultural phenomenon after another — the Crash, the Depression, evangelical religion, communism, various international conflicts — breadth increasingly trumps depth.

Here's hoping the next two installments of this promising trilogy give themselves time to breathe.

Some Luck

By Jane Smiley

Knopf, 416 pp.

Three and a half stars out of four