Here is an extract from the 1980 chapter: “Lilian was vacuuming. Smiley’s century thus far is defined by a flourishing banality: inessential menus, details about clothes, ruminations on crop yields. She is one of several characters (including Arthur, who works for the CIA, and his sympathetic daughter Debbie) who might have detained us were extra time allotted them, but they exist like fragments from unwritten novels. As we plough on through the years (in Iowa there is a lot of ploughing), we are kept conscientiously updated on the key events and people in each year: the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam war, the advent of Aids – each ticked off while Smiley’s characters struggle to signify.įrank Langdon, the wildest card in the family pack, marries Andy, a woman who suffers from chronic emptiness and, disconnected from her emotions, is seduced by her psychoanalyst. The requirements of the calendar restrict the development of drama and do her imagination no favours. Hers is an ambitious marathon and a hugely miscalculated contrivance. Moving from the 1950s to the 1980s, Early Warning by Jane Smiley is epic storytelling at its most wise and compelling from a writer at the height of her powers.Smiley’s contemporary, Marilynne Robinson, in her painstaking Iowan trilogy (its last part, Lila, was published last year), makes a virtue of slowness.

In sickness and health, through their best and darkest times, the Langdon family will live and love and suffer against the broad, merciless sweep of American history. The dark shadow of the Vietnam War hangs over every one. And though a few members of the family remain mired in the past, others will attempt to move beyond the lives they have always known and some will push forward as never before. In Iowa where the Langdons began, Joe sees that some aspects of life on the farm never change, while others are unrecognizable. Claire, too, finds that marriage is not quite what she expected it to be. Lillian must watch as her brilliant, eccentric husband Arthur is destroyed by the guilt arising from his secretive government work. Frank, the eldest - restless, unhappy - ignores his troubled wife and instead finds himself distracted by a face from the past. For now Walter and Rosanna's sons and daughters are grown up and have children of their own. When a funeral brings the Langdon family together once more, they little realize how much, over the coming years, each of their worlds will shift and change.

The second novel in the dazzling Last Hundred Years trilogy, Early Warning follows the Langdon family from the 50s, through to the 1980s, in this stunning family saga from the winner of the Pulitzer Prize 1953.

Early warning jane smiley