Some luck, by Jane Smiley

The first book of an anticipated trilogy, this novel gets off to a very slow start.  Each chapter covers a year, beginning with 1920 and plodding through three decades to 1953.  A generational saga, it chronicles the fortunes of a family farming land near Ames, Iowa.  When Frank, the first of the family to attend college, goes to nearby Iowa State in 1937, he finds “everyone in Ames was just like the landscape – open, bright, friendly, dull.”  And at this point, so was the book and most of the characters.  Perhaps the pedestrian writing is meant to mirror this. [Full disclosure:  my father would have been his classmate and my grandfather possibly one of his professors – maybe I’m too sensitive!]  The action picks up (helped along by a world war and a cold war) in the last third of the book and so does the writing.  By the end of the book, I felt more interested in the characters, the writing became more lyrical, and something resembling a plot had formed.  It is perhaps not enough to make me want to follow the Langdons and their kin, year by year, into the 21^st century.  Disappointing.  395 pp.