Book review: Golden Age, Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley ties up her Iowan trilogy in Golden Age.

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Bill Bryson famously came from Iowa ("Somebody had to"). So do the farming dynasty of Jane Smiley's now-completed trilogy.

Some Luck showed us the Langdons from the 1920s to the 1950s. Early Warning followed them over the next 30-odd years. Golden Age takes us from 1987 to 2019. All three novels feature a chapter for every year. It helps the author with plot movement, but sometimes burdens her with background.

So here, the outside world slides past or smashes in, via 9/11, the 1987 Wall St slump, both Iraq Wars, and a young woman called Lewinsky. So do lower-key, higher-impact events: climate change, rural debt, genetic modification, soil impoverishment, all of which affect and erode rural life.

But, as usual with quality fiction, it's the private lives that engage you most. The novel begins with a just-discovered family member, and ends with the deaths of two others, three generations apart.

In between are births and marriages; separations and reconciliations and abortions; multiple farmers and farming practices. Golden Age comes with a crammed double-page family bush which you'll be referring to often. With so many characters, there's a lot of introduction, explanation, recapitulation.

We have unremittingly unpleasant Michael; Lois, who believes God will provide but stockpiles in the cellar; Philip, who corrects others' grammar as he dies; the aunt who will "sigh and carry on, whether raptured up or left behind" - plus scores more.

It happens mostly on the ancient seabed of Iowa, with its far horizons, droughts and lightning storms:

"brilliant, silent forks like the nervous systems of giants". Farmers now spend hours on the computer, talk loans and growth mediums, walk the fields holding a moisture meter.
The years trek towards an emphatically dystopian near-future. The Missouri is running dry; much of South Dakota is abandoned to dust and dereliction. Gangs of feral teenagers roam. Elsewhere in the world, the EU has sent in troops to quell an uprising in Greece. Yet the book ends not only with obliteration, but acceptance and renewal.

The research is meticulous. Sometimes it squats heavily on the narrative, but mostly the period details stream by. Smiley's control of her characters is astonishing; nearly all are distinctive, credible, sewn almost seamlessly into her family quilt.

"Do you think we've lived through a golden age?" asks one near the novel's end. The answer is ambivalent, but there's no doubt that Smiley has mined rich ore and lore from her Iowans.

• Golden Age by Jane Smiley (Mantle $34.99).

David Hill is a Taranaki writer