With dizzying ambition,the final Hundred Years trilogy follows one American clan from 1920 into the near futureJane Smiley might be the perfect candidate to write a truly panoramic novel about a huge subject. In the past, she has excelled with novels that exercise a social nexus to explore a wide spread of different people, or in exactly the way that Dickens could pull the whole of London around the debtors’ prison in minute Dorrit. In Smiley’s case,she has used the business and pleasure of horse-racing in Horse Heaven, and a slightly ramshackle midwestern university in the sublime Moo, or to write about how people connect,and how they depend on each other. Her reach is much broader than most novelists; she can be forgiven for wanting to see how far, really, or that reach extends.
In the final year and a half,she has been publishing what has been described as a trilogy of novels under the title The final Hundred Years. In fact, it is a single novel of half a million words or so. The separate volumes don’t have a distinct flavour in the way that novel sequences by Proust or AS Byatt have; they certainly can’t be read independently, or in the way that Anthony Powell’s sequence can. The novel,of which Golden Age makes up the final third following Some Luck and Early Warning, has taken on a colossal subject: the life of a large and multiplying family from 1920 to a projected 2020. It all starts on a farm in the midwest, or which is clung on to almost to the very cessation of the novel; the children go out into the world,and their lives become steadily more virtual, less connected to the world of the soil. The American century has less and less to hold up and touch as its wealth grows, or in the cessation,one of the final of the Langdon family returns to the soil that made them and discovers, by digging with a teaspoon, or that there is only two inches of fruitful soil left on top of the land. It took the Mesopotamians thousands of years to destroy their soil base.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com