SOME LUCK is the first installment of a planned trilogy called The Last Hundred Years, and when Jane Smiley says “hundred years,” she really means it. The 34 chapters here each represent a single year between 1920 and 1953. In these chapters, we track the fortunes of the seven members of the Langdon family (plus countless friends and lovers) through the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World War II and the Red Scare. However, SOME LUCK is only concerned with these events insofar as they affect the Langdons. Although Smiley’s scope is epic, she’s not telling the story of civilization --- she’s telling the story of a family.

"Fiction generally presents an enhanced version of life, but in this book, Smiley attempts to make magic from the petty conversations, trips to the store and moments of solitude that make up the vast majority of every person’s time here on earth. It’s an ambitious undertaking, and many writers would not be able to pull it off. But Smiley does."

The book begins with Walter Langdon, newly a father and 25 tomorrow, watching an owl swoop down to catch a rabbit --- one less rabbit that will be eating the oat plants on his farm come spring. But there’s no malice in Walter: he’s a farmer, concerned about the price of milk and the efficacy of his single farmhand, grateful to have a beautiful wife and a healthy son. We meet the wife, Rosanna, and the son, Frank, within the next several pages, and Smiley slips us into their heads as easily as she did Walter’s. Her ability to switch between points of view is remarkable. The novel’s many group scenes sometimes feel like a long, smooth tracking shot, visiting the consciousness of each character so fluently that you hardly realize the shift in perspective until several paragraphs in.

The unique structure of SOME LUCK takes some getting used to. The inexorable march of time feels a little strange when it’s presented in ceaselessly uniform chapters (each between 8 and 15 pages, no exceptions), and there’s no real plot to speak of. Events happen, but they happen as they do in life: quickly, oddly, and not for any direct or immediate purpose. Fiction generally presents an enhanced version of life, but in this book, Smiley attempts to make magic from the petty conversations, trips to the store and moments of solitude that make up the vast majority of every person’s time here on earth. It’s an ambitious undertaking, and many writers would not be able to pull it off. But Smiley does.

There’s a point towards the end of the novel --- 1948, to be precise --- where Rosanna, now gray-haired and several times a grandmother, takes a moment to realize the strangeness of living. Looking around her packed Thanksgiving table, she tries to connect the people she sees with everything that has happened to them over the past three decades: “It could not have happened,” she realizes. “She could not have created this moment, these lovely faces, these candles flickering, the flash of silverware, the fragrances of the food hanging over the table, the heads turning this way and that, the voices murmuring and laughing.” And indeed, this is how it feels sometimes. When we look at people we have known forever, it seems astonishing that they should be standing there with a suit and tie, or holding a child, because we knew them when they were children themselves.

The truth is that most lives are not nicely narrative. Yet, when we pause and try to trace how we got to where we are, a long, meandering narrative takes shape, and it can be shocking to realize that this narrative is legitimately the story of your life. SOME LUCK is a book that sneaks up on you in this way. By the time you realize how close you’ve grown to these characters, the novel is already over, and the characters are gone.

Until the next installment of the trilogy, of course.