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Family helps set stage for Jane Smiley’s Last Hundred Years Triology
By Rob Cline, correspondent
Oct. 25, 2015 9:00 am
Jane Smiley's Last Hundred Years Trilogy has been released over the last year, with the first volume published in October 2014 and the second in April 2015. The final book, 'Golden Age,” which follows 'Some Luck” and 'Early Warning,” was released this week. The unusual publication schedule is the result of taking a single, but enormous work, and divvying it into (still substantial) chunks.
Smiley, a Pulitzer Prize winner and graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, has been pleased with how the rollout has worked.
'I'm really glad it came out this way because it gave people the opportunity ... to take it in over the course of the year,” she says in a phone interview from her home in California. She cited the conversations she's had with young readers who enjoy her YA novels - readers who are always disappointed when they learn it will be at least a year before the next novel arrives. 'Readers, when they get enthusiastic, they want (the next book) pretty soon.”
The Last Hundred Years Trilogy follows the fortunes and foibles of several generations of the Langdons, an Iowa farm family whose members disperse widely over time, from 1920 through 2019. Each chapter covers a single year. Of course, many of those years are years the author remembers from personal experience, but Smiley made it clear that the books aren't autobiographical.
'There were memories that I had from the late 1950s on ... but they weren't the same memories that the Langdons would have had. My memories were a resource, but they weren't directive ... I used myself as another research possibility.”
She also used each of her four husbands - to whom the trilogy is dedicated - as sources of information and ideas. 'They are quite different in their areas of expertise,” she says. One is a 'pop culture maven;” another is highly observant and knowledgeable about Vietnam; a third is a lawyer; and the fourth is a 'naughty boy with experiences to offer on the naughty boy front.”
As the years roll by in her story, the number of characters continues to grow. A family tree at the front of each volume helps the reader keep everyone straight, but Smiley also gave significant thought to how she might aid the reader as the complexity increased.
'One way is to give the characters very distinct names ... One of our big jobs was to be sure that the names were distinct and would stick in the reader's mind while also being appropriate to the time.”
For example, she originally had two twins named Richie and Robbie, but realized this would be far too confusing. Knowing that Robbie would be something of a villain, she changed his name to Michael, a name she called 'vaguely sinister.”
But making characters memorable is about more than names. 'I made the effort to make the characters so much themselves that they're like your relatives. You don't get your relatives mixed up.”
When writing an historical novel or series - particularly one of this scope - a writer must pick and choose from a staggering array of possible incidents to include. To help her make these decisions, Smiley kept her focus on the characters.
'I knew what the history was,” she says, 'but the overall story evolved from who the characters were.”
Some of the selections were driven by plausibility, while others were unavoidable. For example, Smiley acknowledges that Richie is 'an unlikely congressman, but he's a plausible congressman, so I got to make him a congressman.” That decision led directly to some of the incidents included in the story. Meanwhile, Jesse, a character who continues farming long after most of the family has left Iowa entirely, spends much time considering the ongoing changes in fertilizer and seeds over the years. 'That was not only plausible,” Smiley says, 'but necessary.”
While some major historical events are highlighted, other events, both big and small, find their way into the pages of the story more subtly. 'I had to pick which events I was going to focus on, and other events I had to scatter in like herbs to give some flavor.”
As she shaped her characters' lives, Smiley was interested in 'what has emotional meaning to them. I love that part.”
When it comes to emotion, Smiley - who admits to weeping as she wrote some portions of the story, and expects readers may well weep, as well - believes sadness is an essential part of her story.
'As we look around us, we have to acknowledge the sadness,” she says.
Maybe so, but readers should be happy to spend a century with Smiley's fictional family.
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