Chapter Seventy-Two
Jane Smiley
Smart Luck
Since Jane Smiley’s 1980 debut novel, Barn Blind (an American pastoral centered on a family fraught with clashing ambitions), and through and beyond her 1992 Pulitzer Prize–winning A Thousand Acres (a modern American reinterpretation of King Lear), she’s been a self-proclaimed fiddler—a writer who toys with form, plucks at connective threads, and pulls notes from history both near and ancient. This fiddling, says Smiley, comes from a deep sense of curiosity. And that curiosity shines through as she talks: Interesting, think, know, learn, and understand are words she uses frequently in conversation, and it’s apparent in her body of work that she has a broad range of interests.
The Iowa Writers’ Workshop alumna and former Iowa Writers’ Workshop professor has written twenty-one books of fiction of seemingly every variety, including a series of young adult novels (Horses of Oak Valley Ranch), a murder mystery (Duplicate Keys), historical fiction (The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton; Private Life), humor (Moo; Horse Heaven), a Norse epic (The Greenlanders), contemporary fiction (Good Faith; Ten Days in the Hills), short stories (The Age of Grief), and novellas (Ordinary Love and Good Will).
Smiley has also written nonfiction works about everything from mountain-town artisans (Catskill Crafts) to horses (A Year at the Races) to famous figures (The Man Who Invented the Computer: The Biography of John Atanasoff, Digital Pioneer) to the challenge and evolution of writing (13 Ways of Looking at the Novel).
And now, for the first time, Smiley has written a literary trilogy. The three books of The Last Hundred Years, each equal in length and span of time, follow the Langdon family and their five children (Frank, the character Smiley describes as “probably the protagonist—he would say that he is, anyway,” Joe, Lillian, Henry, and Claire) from 1920 through 2019—from their farm in Iowa to a handful of major American cities and far-flung countries, and through the births and marriages and deaths of some forty characters—as the world experiences war, economic flux, social upheaval, and climate change. The saga begins with 2014’s Some Luck (fans of A Thousand Acres will recognize the Denby, Iowa, location), continues in April 2015’s Early Warning and concludes with Golden Age, released in October 2015. All three books were immediate bestsellers.
What will the Langdon family’s future hold—or the author’s own? Here, Smiley speaks with us about the trilogy, the craft, how publishing has changed since she started, and why she’s the luckiest woman she knows.
In The Last Hundred Years, each chapter covers one year, and the three books encompass a full century. That’s an ambitious project. What inspired the idea?
The idea started with the title of the trilogy, and so out of that the structure came. … I wanted the characters all to come and go and to be equal in some sense.
I wanted to have each year be equal over the course of one hundred years. I didn’t want to give any extra importance or weight to any particular year. And then I wanted to weave the stories into the years. It may be that somebody else has done that, but I haven’t read any books that have done that. I thought it would be an interesting concept, and I wanted to see where it led.
I hope it’s a new idea. It didn’t start out as a new or daring idea. It just started out as Let’s try it, you know? Let’s see what happens. And then I got drawn in by the characters and their relationships with one another and I stuck with the form because I found the form interesting, but the ways that the characters talked and interacted with one another really drove me forward. I really did want to see what they did and I really did want to see how they related to one another and what sort of families they had and what sort of lives they built, and it was incredibly fun. You know, some books are more fun than others, and this one was incredible amounts of fun.
What was your process for choosing which parts of history to touch on?
I read a lot of the history, and some of it was very detailed. My main goal was to give each character certain characteristics, and then to set them up. And then I sort of sent them out into the world. I did my best to understand the world that they were going out into, and then I had them react to it according to their individual temperament and other experiences. So of course Frank, who’s quite well coordinated and brave and quite daring, and you might say a little self-involved—he’s going to go out into the world differently from his brother Joe. I didn’t quite know how it was going to turn out. I mean, I knew what the history was in general, so I knew what they were going to have to deal with, but a lot of stuff just cropped up.
How did you handle the years 2015 through 2019 in Golden Age?
Well, I fiddled. I kept fiddling all along. My main concern in these books, I would have to say, because it starts on the farm, is climate, weather—those kinds of issues. I think it’s pretty clear what our future is in terms of climate and weather issues. So I fiddled a little bit with the details, and I did make a president in the 2016 election. We’ll see if I’m right or not. We’ll see. … I thought it was time to try it out. Basically, you know, make it work—predict a little bit of the future and see if I was right. I went back and forth and back and forth and back and forth on what I should do with the future.
You’ve had a long, varied, successful publishing career. Do you feel as if the industry has changed too much for new writers to achieve similar success?
You know, I don’t really have any idea. You’d have to ask my friends from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop if they felt that. Some of us have been very successful, some of us have been not so successful, some of us gave it up long ago, some of us are still working at it. I think we had one advantage, which was that publishing wasn’t such a big deal. It was very diverse in terms of how many companies were publishing books. There was a big small-press presence, and so there were a lot of entry doors. And most of the entry doors were very small.
My best friend, who was in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with me, moved to New York and became an editor. She was a very promising writer, but she decided she didn’t want to write books, so she gave up writing and became an assistant editor. Her boss liked her a lot and he gave her a certain amount of freedom, and so he let her publish a couple of my books. And that gave me the entry that I needed. And those were [what I think of as] “practice books” and I was no big deal, and every so often I would get a pat on the head and it was a wonderful thing to do. So that was a good way [to get started] in those days.
These days, the entry doors are a little bit different, but there are still ways in, not only through publishing but also through self-publishing. So the real question is not Can I get published? but Can I make any money? And nobody knows the answer to that. That’s a thing that you can only discover retrospectively. And if you’re lucky you can say, Well, I guess I did, and if you’re not so lucky, you can say, Well, I guess I didn’t.
But I don’t have any advice, really, because it’s not just that the publishing world has changed since I started, it’s that the publishing world is always changing. There was an article by the writer Chris Offutt about his dad, who wrote hack porn for years. I think it was on the order of hundreds of novels, and [at that time] there were people who wrote hack mysteries, and there were people who wrote other kinds of popular novels, and those [all] went by the wayside. When Dickens started, he serialized his books in magazines, and then that went by the wayside.
To me, what is really important is that there seems to be a persistent audience for reading books, for reading novels. Hooray, you know? As long as there’s a persistent audience for reading novels, then there’s going to be some way for them to be published.
Do you think it’s easier now to find a writing community than it was pre-Internet?
My daughter works at Book Country [Penguin Random’s online writing community, bookcountry.com]. I feel compelled to ask her advice. Book Country is a really interesting website because it’s like an online writers workshop. You can just go on and connect with people and read things and learn from it and get advice. I think it’s fascinating, and I’m glad she works there, and I think she’s learning a lot. I try to get advice from her; she doesn’t get advice from me. [Laughs.]
It seems to me that the history of writing is closely connected to the history of people being able to find a community that helps them write work, learn from each other’s work, and understand their own work. It’s very rare that a person just shows up and they’ve got a book and they wrote it all on their own and they don’t know anybody. Usually the first thing they do is get into a social system or social group that is interested in writing. Those people encourage you and give you the criticism that you need. That’s the way it happened with Shakespeare, that’s the way it happened with Virginia Woolf, that’s the way it happened with Charles Dickens. It’s good for you to do that, especially when you’re young; that way, you are eased into the literary world, and you always feel connected to people around you, and you always feel that you’re learning from people around you.
It is inevitable in our world that people are going to do this on the Internet. Is that better? Is that worse? I have no idea. It’s just another form of something that’s been going on since Athens. Literature is a form of communication. When we first start—whether it’s in a workshop or hanging out by the Parthenon—it’s because we want to communicate. We just modify our ways of communicating as the world changes. The tool changes, but the desire to communicate, the desire to tell stories, that seems to be continuous.
You called your early novels “practice books.”
Yes! I was so lucky. I’m a big fan of Anthony Trollope, and one of my favorite novels of his is one called The Kellys and the O’Kellys, which he wrote when he was in Ireland, and it sold very poorly in England. Both of his Irish novels, The Kellys and the O’Kellys and The Macdermots of Ballycloran, sold very poorly. And yet he got the chance to write those novels in obscurity. … I realized that he had had a mildly similar experience to mine. He got to write a couple of novels, he got them published, he got a few readers, he got that sense of how to do it. And then when he went on to write The Warden, he already kind of knew what he was doing because he had gotten those practice novels.
I think it’s harder—I don’t know from my own experience, but it looks like from the outside—that it’s harder if you strike a big success with your first book, because what do you know? You don’t know nothin’. And then the pressure is on you. The great thing about your practice novels is that there’s no pressure. Nobody cares. And so you get to do the best you can and learn from it, rather than having a big, hit novel.
You’re hoping to improve, but eventually, or at least in my case, you’re doing what you want to do because you’re curious about that idea. My motivation for writing has always been curiosity. I prefer to write about things that I know a little about, but not a whole lot about. Then when I write the novel, it becomes completely interesting to me because I’m finding out about things I didn’t know before.
When I was first starting out, pretty early on, I came up with several ideas. And then I worked out those ideas as I grew into them. I had the idea for The Greenlanders years before I started it, but I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to do it because I didn’t have the skills. One of my practice novels is a murder mystery—Duplicate Keys. ... I’d read a lot of murder mysteries when I was a kid, especially Agatha Christie, and so I knew that if I worked on a murder mystery that I would be able to learn how to do a plot. Once I had done that, I felt as if I had at least a little more knowledge. And so then I felt I could contemplate The Greenlanders more.
A Thousand Acres gets a lot of attention, even twenty-four years after it won the Pulitzer and so many books later. Do you feel it’s your best work?
I don’t ever say “best.” I think it’s all personal. So for me, it’s not What’s your best? but What’s your favorite? Because you can’t be objective. It all depends on what suits you. I don’t believe in “best” lists. I just think it’s all a personal choice. I would say that I’m quite fond of The Greenlanders, I’m quite fond of Horse Heaven. I love Moo. Comic novels never get to be “the best” because their audience is always quite particular—much more particular. And I also love Early Warning.
I don’t think too much about A Thousand Acres. I understand that I’ve been lucky. If you’re lucky, it gets better and better.
Do you feel lucky?
Absolutely! How could you not? I mean, the biggest piece of luck is that you get to do what you want, and once you get to do what you want, then you are defined as lucky. And in some ways, that is the definition of success, as far as I’m concerned. You’re lucky if you don’t have to subordinate the things you want to do in order to survive.
Of course I understand that it’s luck. But I’m not going to walk away from it for that reason. … I understand that I’ve been lucky and that my job is to continue on and keep going.