Iowa farm clan returns in 'Warning'
Boomers, this one's for you.
Early Warning (***1/2 out of four), the second volume in Jane Smiley's trilogy of masterful novels about an Iowa farm family, opens in 1953, at the height of the Cold War, and takes us through 1986.
Along the way, the Langdons, their lovers, spouses, kids and friends live their domestic lives against a panoramic backdrop of recent history: Beatlemania, Vietnam, student protests, CIA shenanigans, the assassinations of both Kennedy brothers, the Jonestown massacre, President Carter's grain embargo, the women's movement, the AIDS crisis.
On the home front, the everyday events in these characters' lives are no less seismic: divorce, cancer, nervous breakdowns, alcoholism. But also ordinary: marriage, babies, sometimes even contentment.
Smiley's brilliance is twofold. In telling the story of an American family, she unfurls the troubled trajectory of 20th century America. Her prose, almost documentary-like, is slyly revealing, offering small, moving, sometimes funny epiphanies that reward the attentive reader. ("Who you are shapes how you are loved," one father tells his disappointed grown daughter.)
Some Luck, the first book, released just last fall, began the story of farmer Walter Langdon, his wife Rosanna and their brood of kids in 1920, and swept through the Depression and World War II. Early Warning opens with Walter's funeral in 1953, and these kids, now grown up, saying goodbye to their father.
The eldest son, Frank, the most fascinating character in Some Luck, is soon on a flight to Iran with a pile of money to help facilitate a CIA coup. Then back to New York and his cold marriage to the elegant but numbed Andy.
Tough but charismatic Frank — a chronic cheater — will remind Mad Men fans of an edgier Don Draper (Frank "was no less good-looking than he had always been, just sharper and harder") and his wife Andy of sad, neglected Betty Draper. Frank's siblings, sisters Lillian and Claire, and brothers Joe and Henry, travel their own paths. Smiley makes her characters utterly individual, each grown into the logical adult from the child we met in the first book.
Her ability to write from a child's point of view — to literally see the world from a knee-high vantage point — is something of a miracle, and never sentimental.
We meet a new generation — the baby-boom kids of Frank and his siblings — in Early Warning, who grow up before our eyes, as their parents did in the first book. (An adopted boy named Charlie is one of the most intriguing characters to appear in Early Warning; astute readers will unravel his parentage.)
As we land in the 1980s, yet another generation of Langdons is beginning to arrive in the world. Frank is a grandfather; can he be mellowing just a bit?
Time will tell. Bring on volume three — soon, please — and the Millennial Langdons.
Early Warning
By Jane Smiley
Knopf.
3 1/2 out of four