A review by mattydalrymple
Some Luck by Jane Smiley

5.0

Ms. Smiley is one of my favorite authors. I love her characters, even when they are behaving badly, and I love reading the details of their lives which in this book, which spans four decades, must have taken an extraordinary amount of research to render accurately. I also, paradoxically, love the fact that the plot of "Some Luck" is so undramatic--for the first half of the book the most exciting thing that happens is that a farmer almost falls into a well. Even when one of the farmer's sons goes to fight in World War 2, the focus is less on the events on the battlefield than on his experiences off it. But despite the lack of drama, I was so engaged in the story of the characters' lives that I could hardly put the book down and was sad when it ended (which it did without any sort of conventional resolution). It's a talented writer who can hold a reader's attention with such a book. I'm now reading Smiley's "13 Ways of Looking at the Novel" to see if I can learn how she does it, and to see if any of those lessons can be applied to a suspense novel. Perhaps not, but it will be fun to consider.