It is interesting when a novelist of stature – Smiley is one of America’s greatest living writers, a Pulitzer prize-winning virtuoso, with each of her novels reading like a new departure – produces two books that seem to be suffering from a colossal power failure, as though written to kill time. And in a sense, killing time is what her new trilogy is about. The books span a century, with each year getting a chapter to itself. This is the story of the Langdons, a farming family in Iowa. We meet Walter and Rosanna and their five children in the first volume, Some Luck (1920-1953), and observe in the second, Early Warning (1953-1986), the slow-growing family tree branch out. The third volume, Golden Age, is still to come.
Smiley’s contemporary, Marilynne Robinson, in her painstaking Iowan trilogy (its last part, Lila, was published last year), makes a virtue of slowness. She controls time. For Smiley, time controls narrative. Hers is an ambitious marathon and a hugely miscalculated contrivance. The requirements of the calendar restrict the development of drama and do her imagination no favours. 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.
Frank 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. 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.
Smiley’s century thus far is defined by a flourishing banality: inessential menus, details about clothes, ruminations on crop yields. Here is an extract from the 1980 chapter: “Lilian was vacuuming. She liked vacuuming more than any other household task, and she had gone ahead and let the door-to-door salesman sell her the Kirby, not because she needed a new vacuum cleaner, but because she liked having two, one at each end of the house. Now she was pushing it under the bed. It was heavy, it was loud, it made her feel as though she were sucking every microbe out of the carpet and smashing it to atoms.”
This is not a book for a reader in a hurry. There is much eating of cookies while waiting for life to recommence. And while you could argue that this is what life involves, it does not follow that it is what you want in a novel. Smiley is also hypnotised by toddlers and the toddler’s-eye-view passages demand from the reader a patience equivalent to that needed when entertaining a two-year-old. They read like the work of a grandmother unable to see that her grandchildren are not as compelling to others as they are to herself.
When drama does come – Walter nearly falls down a well (Vol 1); his daughter has breast cancer (Vol 2), his grandson is killed in Vietnam (Vol 2) – one has the sense that Smiley – a never less than benign creator – is shaking the family tree with reluctance. But for the reader, any death is a welcome break, and the description of the birth of Frank’s grandchild a gladdening reminder that Smiley is, after all, an expert midwife.
Early Warning is published by Mantle (£18.99). Click here to buy it for £15.19
