The final installment in Jane Smiley's Last Hundred Years trilogy is here!

Mon, 11/02/2015 - 12:05pm by eapearce

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley has gifted readers with numerous stories of the American heartland over the years. Her most recent endeavor has been the Last Hundred Years trilogy: three volumes following the same family over the course of a century. Beginning with Some Luck and continuing with Early Warning, the series concludes with the recently published Golden Age.

The deftness with which Smiley has managed to tell the stories of the family members is truly amazing. Some Luck begins in 1920 and each chapter represents one year, continuing through 1952. Early Warning picks up in 1953 and continues through the late 1980s, while Golden Age will carry us through 2019. The cast of characters is ever-expanding, but Smiley manages to keep the story coherent and detailed through all of the novels. One would think that it would be difficult to develop characters when the story is moving so quickly and the cast is so large, but Smiley shares the exact right amount of emotions and events so that readers feel truly immersed in the story and in the lives of the family members. The trilogy is more than just the story of a family, however. It's really a portrait of America over the course of the past century: the successes, the failures, the memorable events, the changing landscape, the cultural revolution, the technological invasion. Smiley uses her characters to comment on historical events and to offer unique perspectives and representations.

I'm still on the waitlist for Golden Age, but can't wait to see how the series concludes, and to read Smiley's interpretation of the past few decades, which contain events that I will personally remember. If you haven't read any of this trilogy yet, get started with Some Luck--and get on the hold list for Golden Age!