This audiobook looked mildly interesting when I borrowed it, but Lorelei King's reading isn't much better than the computerized text-to-audio function, so I could hardly even pay attention to the content. I didn't listen to enough to rate it. DNF after 10 minutes. 

Audiobook, borrowed from my public library via Overdrive. 

Longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award

From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize: a powerful, engrossing new novel—the life and times of a remarkable family over three transformative decades in America. 

On their farm in Denby, Iowa, Rosanna and Walter Langdon abide by time-honored values that they pass on to their five wildly different children: from Frank, the handsome, willful first born, and Joe, whose love of animals and the land sustains him, to Claire, who earns a special place in her father’s heart.

Each chapter in Some Luck covers a single year, beginning in 1920, as American soldiers like Walter return home from World War I, and going up through the early 1950s, with the country on the cusp of enormous social and economic change. As the Langdons branch out from Iowa to both coasts of America, the personal and the historical merge seamlessly: one moment electricity is just beginning to power the farm, and the next a son is volunteering to fight the Nazis; later still, a girl you’d seen growing up now has a little girl of her own, and you discover that your laughter and your admiration for all these lives are mixing with tears.   

Some Luck delivers on everything we look for in a work of fiction. Taking us through cycles of births and deaths, passions and betrayals, among characters we come to know inside and out, it is a tour de force that stands wholly on its own. But it is also the first part of a dazzling epic trilogy—a literary adventure that will span a century in America: an astonishing feat of storytelling by a beloved writer at the height of her powers.

The final book in the trilogy!

Smiley continues with the different generations of the Langdon family. I had a little trouble remembering who was who at first, since it took months and months ot get this from my library queue.

The only odd thing about this book is how she works very hard to get someone in the family involved in what feels like every major event of the last 30 years. Or maybe it feels that way to me, since I remember those years. Maybe others felt that way about the last book too? But then, this is a large family, much larger than mine, so maybe it's not that strange.

It also felt a bit weird how she continued the story for a few years past the publishing date. They are a wee bit more vague (the 2016 presidential election winner nor their party is named, for example). How real with these chapters feel in 2 years?

I especially enjoyed--and was mind-bogglingly frustrated by—the sociopathic Michael, his right-wing nutjob wife, and his thieving corporate cronies who are never punished. Grrrrrr...just how I feel when I read the news.

Golden Age, Jane Smiley, author, Lorelei King, narrator
This is the third installment in a three part series about the Langdon family. The hundred years begins in the year 1920; this book begins in 1987, and takes us up to the future in 2019. For me, the best one in the series was the first, “Some Luck”. I did make a valiant attempt to read this one, but I failed. I even skipped to the end to see if there was something taking place in the future to hold my interest, but alas, there was not.

It is a major feat of accomplishment if you can keep track of all of the characters, the old and the new. Even taking advantage of the family tree printed in the book, it is a challenge. In addition, if you have any interest in, or can keep track of, all of the details right down to what they ate at meals, you are a better “man” than I am. After listening to more than 8 hours of this more than 17 ½ hour audio, I simply gave up. I felt like I was reading a propaganda treatise, disguised as a novel. It simply got too tedious, its politics leaned too far left, and the narrator, though she did an admirable job, could not hold me anymore than the story did.

Over the century, the family suffers through all of the warts and foibles of any family, including the ups and downs of society’s cycles and pivots from one crisis to another, from imbalances in political powers, to economic failures, to bias in the news without skipping a beat. Every sort of societal issue is experienced in this family: divorce, homosexuality, infidelity, secrets, lies, anti-Semitism, mental illness, evil corporations, childhood Cancer, gun control, PTSD, the mistakes of the Iraq war, the dangers of climate change and more. This should give everyone the idea that the author is a liberal and, indeed, she has put forth every liberal view she could while trashing every opposing view from the right with negative terms or implications. All I could finally do was scream, ENOUGH! It went on and on ad nauseam. Perhaps one vignette about each family would have been manageable, but there were simply too many about each member of each family. Did I really need to know that the grilled cheese was made with Emmenthaler Swiss or Black Forest Ham? Okay, so the characters and details did have to be part of the book, but did they have to be dissected?

I ask this question seriously: Is the new measure of the value of a book the number of liberal issues that can be put forth in the maximum amount of pages? The book is too long, there are too many characters and aside from the series being a family saga taking place over 100 years, it simply did not get better with each volume and seemed to have no redeeming feature for me except for its historic content which was well researched, but it was presented with too many, of what I can only assume, are the author’s personal, political views. On a positive note, the characters were very well developed, even if forgettable, because of the number of them.

Finally, after awhile, although I rarely ever give up on a book, this one just became too much for me. I simply did not enjoy listening to it or being harangued by the overwhelming, sometimes outright and sometimes subtle, criticisms of the views of those on the right, of the Republicans, while the views of those on the left, the Democrats, were extolled unmercifully.

Golden Age is the third and final book in Jane Smiley’s Last Hundred Years: A Family Saga trilogy, which began with Some Luck. The Langdon family has spread far and wide since the first chapter of Some Luck opened in 1920, but both books start in the same place--the farm fields of Iowa. The story has now reached 1987, but by the end of the book Golden Age transports readers into the future, through to 2019, to complete the 100 years promised in the series name.

Since family members are living all over the country, the narrative moves around, spending time in California, Chicago, New York, Washington DC, and of course Iowa. Langdon family occupations and obsessions now include politics, wall street wheeling and dealing, linguistics, literature, horses, rodeo, climate change, and (of course, again) farming, so the story delves into all those areas. Among the characters are a former cult member, a college professor, an artist, a congressman, and the current crop of farmers. It makes for a fascinating mix of perspectives.  

Like its two predecessors, Golden Age has a chapter for each of the years that it covers. The family tree at the front of the book has gotten a lot fuller, and I had to refer to it frequently in earlier chapters, but that became less necessary as the book went on, both because Smiley doesn’t focus on every Langdon descendant, and because she has a way of depicting her characters so they make an impression that sticks.

In this book I really enjoyed re-living history I can remember (and some I had forgotten) through the lives of several generations of Langdons--Smiley does a good job capturing the mood of the times she writes about. Taking the series as a whole, it was very interesting to see the wider views that a one hundred year story allows for, including all the changes farming has gone through since the 1920’s. Though these books don’t have traditional plot arcs there’s still a lot going on, and even when Smiley is just relating quotidian events in the characters lives, or their musings about the world around them, the story is somehow completely compelling.