It's hard to strike a balance in this type of book between everyday life and the touchstone events that mark all members of a generation, and Smiley occasionally embroiders the periphery of the story with encounters that feel superfluous. One character becomes obsessed with increasingly baroque forms of psychoanalysis another dies in Vietnam still another becomes involved with Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. Meanwhile, the '50s turn into the '60s, and then the '70s, with close calls but few real blow-ups. But where readers of Smiley's Pulitzer-winning rewrite of 'King Lear,' 'A Thousand Acres,' might expect a fratricide down the line, the twins' antipathy mellows in adulthood to a mild prickliness. Though inseparable, the boys grow up secretly hating each other, expressing their sociopathic tendencies in dangerous pranks.

For instance, Frank's prematurely born twins, Richie and Michael, are too small and weak for his taste to make up for it, he pits them against each other relentlessly, even setting up a home race course for them at 2 years old and encouraging each to beat the other at any cost. 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 is particularly good on the kind of family dynamics that simmer along for decades just under the surface, never quite coming to a head. 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. For now Walter and Rosanna's sons and daughters are grown up and have children of their own.įrank, the eldest - restless, unhappy - ignores his troubled wife and instead finds himself distracted by a face from the past. 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 Prizeġ953.

Early warning jane smiley