≡ Libro Early Warning A novel The Last Hundred Years Trilogy A Family Saga Jane Smiley 9780307700322 Books

Early Warning A novel The Last Hundred Years Trilogy A Family Saga Jane Smiley 9780307700322 Books

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Early Warning A novel The Last Hundred Years Trilogy A Family Saga Jane Smiley 9780307700322 Books

Early Warning is a very engaging and thoughtful study of an extended family as they progress over about 30 years. Uniquely written in chapters that cover each year, Smiley provides "mini-stories" of 1 - 4 of the characters and their experiences during that time. Everything is tied together so even though we may not hear about a specific character for several years, we can easily understand what their lives have been like.

Smiley does a wonderful job capturing the ambiance of the location, the political and economic situations of the time, and the moral/ethical norms of the time in question. As the book covers 30 years, all of these situations evolve and it is done seamlessly as if the reader is experiencing them in real time. Characters are realistic and very well-developed, with their strengths and flaws realistically portrayed.

This is the 2nd in a trilogy, it had been about a year since I finished the 1st installment (Some Luck; it took a while for the Kindle version to reach a reasonable price point as I refuse to pay more for a Kindle version than Amazon charges for a paperback of the same book). As a result, it took me a while to remember who was who. However, even after these folks came back to me, the fact that the family became so extended made it hard at times to follow without a "scorecard". While it is natural that the original family would grow with marriages, children, and grandchildren, i sometimes found myself focusing more on the "who's who" than on the specific mini-story and message. I can only imagine this problem will become even more compounded with the final installment (Golden Age). Nevertheless, I intend to complete the trilogy in the future.

Smiley is an excellent writer and this book would be wonderful for any consumer of fine literature.


Tags : Early Warning: A novel (The Last Hundred Years Trilogy: A Family Saga) [Jane Smiley] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <b>From the Pulitzer Prize-winner: the second installment, following Some Luck, </i>of her widely acclaimed,Jane Smiley,Early Warning: A novel (The Last Hundred Years Trilogy: A Family Saga),Knopf,0307700321,Family Life,Domestic fiction,Domestic fiction.,Farm life,Historical fiction,Iowa,Rural families,Rural families - Iowa,Rural families;Iowa;Fiction.,Social change - United States - History - 20th century,Social change;United States;History;20th century;Fiction.,United States - Civilization - 20th century,American Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors +,FICTION Family Life General,Fiction,Fiction - General,Fiction Historical,Fiction Literary,Fiction Sagas,FictionHistorical - General,Historical - General,Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945),Sagas,Smiley, Jane - Prose & Criticism

Early Warning A novel The Last Hundred Years Trilogy A Family Saga Jane Smiley 9780307700322 Books Reviews

I finished Jane Smiley's "Some Luck" feeling ambivalent. I had really expected to like it, but my expectation of being drawn in, as I've experienced with Ms. Smiley's writing before, fizzled out. The chapters roll through the years as the minutia of family happenings, and non-happenings, are narrated by the different characters. I was ready for the final page long before I got there, but plugged along with faith in Jane Smiley to eventually bring it (whatever "it" is) so that I would become immersed. It never happened. Still faithful, not to mention that I had already purchased "Early Warning" in anticipation of enjoyment, I immediately started this, the second installment. I was halfway through it when I put it down for the night and never went back. The third installment hasn't been released and I am able to cancel my preorder. I'm just not getting what's significant about what seems to be the (very good) telling of a family's mundane history.
Jane Smiley is one of our greatest living writers, hands down. This hundred-year trilogy is beautifully written, brilliantly conceived, and incredibly ambitious...maybe too ambitious, though, and therein lies the reason for my four-star review. I just couldn't remember enough from the first book for many of the characters and plot lines in this second book to make sense. A nagging sense of "shoot, what happened to this person in the first book again?" and "how are these people related?" and "where the heck is all this taking place?" kind of dogged me throughout. Not unlike a 500-page-long menopausal moment! But just reading Smiley's prose is enough somehow...there are passages that took my breath away, made me cry, and want to call my siblings just to tell them I loved them.
As a tremendous fan of Jane Smiley's 1991 Pulitzer winning novel, "A Thousand Acres", imagine my wild excitement at the thought of a literary return to rural Iowa, a small farming community, and a family drama with this phenomenal author. This is what fiction lovers live for, right? I hungrily downloaded the first book of the trilogy, "Some Luck", earlier this year and went to bed early, holding on to my like someone might hold on to a missed loved one's hand. I was patient. Her literary devise of beginning her saga through the eyes of babies was definitely a technique unfamiliar to me...but I reasoned to myself that her motives were brilliant. Alas...although I can't say I didn't become involved with the Langdon family through their beginning years...I was not mesmerized. This trilogy would not be a return to "A Thousand Acres".

Ironically, and fortunately for me, I felt at the time, I had registered to attend the Orange County Literary Woman's Conference in May and Jane Smiley was to be the keynote speaker. How exciting! Right in between the 1st book of her new trilogy and the release of the second a chance to hear Ms. Smiley speak seemed like such a privilege. She arrived comically disheveled and apparently embarrassingly unprepared to speak to her crowd of readers. She rambled on for 45 minutes or so about nothing of interest and didn't even mention her new books. I was bereft with disappointment...but trudged forward with "Early Warning".

I would give anything to have enjoyed this book. I did not. It is 447 pages long and it seemed like there were 447 characters to keep track of. The family tree printed in the beginning of the text is useless for readers. Honestly, if "Some Luck" had been a more compelling read, I may have not had so much trouble recalling all of the Langdon's and their stories. None of the narrative developed around these decidedly uninteresting people had found their way into my consciousness in an intense enough way that I still cared about them. I did like each chapter beginning with a new year and the weaving of current events into the text. Politics of the day, the assassinations, the People's Temple episode, economic circumstances and some pop culture helped to ground the narrative. But I just could not invest in these characters. I take issue with the concept that a lower middle class farm family from rural Iowa would produce a group of hyper educated, rich, jet setting, and politically relevant offspring. Really? Everyone was uber successful? I guess I have an affinity for the poor and struggling. Is it just me? Or does anyone else find it unusual that the uneducated, homespun, and ever hard working, Walter and Rosanna, would not have even one child who wasn't worth a million?

Then there was Mom's (Rosanna) shift from benign farm wife and loving mother to snarky old lady. There wasn't any reason given for Rosanna's morph into a pain in the a##. It seemed so arbitrary. So that the reader didn't care much about her one way or another towards her end. I suspect the problem here is that Jane Smiley has created too many character to develop sufficiently. I was just unable to become attached to them. I have invested so much time at this point, that I will probably read the last of the trilogy....but I find "Early Warning" about as unkempt and discombobulated as I found the author to be at her speaking engagement...and I'm not very happy about it.
Early Warning is a very engaging and thoughtful study of an extended family as they progress over about 30 years. Uniquely written in chapters that cover each year, Smiley provides "mini-stories" of 1 - 4 of the characters and their experiences during that time. Everything is tied together so even though we may not hear about a specific character for several years, we can easily understand what their lives have been like.

Smiley does a wonderful job capturing the ambiance of the location, the political and economic situations of the time, and the moral/ethical norms of the time in question. As the book covers 30 years, all of these situations evolve and it is done seamlessly as if the reader is experiencing them in real time. Characters are realistic and very well-developed, with their strengths and flaws realistically portrayed.

This is the 2nd in a trilogy, it had been about a year since I finished the 1st installment (Some Luck; it took a while for the version to reach a reasonable price point as I refuse to pay more for a version than charges for a paperback of the same book). As a result, it took me a while to remember who was who. However, even after these folks came back to me, the fact that the family became so extended made it hard at times to follow without a "scorecard". While it is natural that the original family would grow with marriages, children, and grandchildren, i sometimes found myself focusing more on the "who's who" than on the specific mini-story and message. I can only imagine this problem will become even more compounded with the final installment (Golden Age). Nevertheless, I intend to complete the trilogy in the future.

Smiley is an excellent writer and this book would be wonderful for any consumer of fine literature.