Setting her novel in the farmlands of Iowa, as she did with A Thousand Acres, author Jane Smiley once again homes in on a proud farm family as it faces crises connected with its land. This novel, however, has a broader, less intensely climactic sweep than A Thousand Acres, in which the action parallels that of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Some Luck is quieter and more contemplative, the first of a trilogy which will eventually trace three generations of the Langdon family from 1920 to 2020, as it becomes a microcosm for one hundred years of United States history. Smiley’s characters, beautifully realized through her trademark use of perfect small details to illuminate bigger aspects of personality, illustrate the many different talents, and ultimately goals, of a family whose members are firmly rooted in the land, which is their only real asset. Some members will eventually choose to leave the farm, while others choose to stay. Smiley limits each chapter to one calendar year beginning in 1920 – the births and deaths, the hopes and dreams, the rhythms of nature and the yearly rituals it inspires, the uncertainties of daily life and the accidents of fate, the roles which each character chooses to accept or reject within the family, and the unpredictable, often dramatic effects of national events on people who have no control over them. The novel ends in 1953 with the focus on new family members who will face another set of topical issues in the next novel.
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Author Elizabeth Taylor, who failed her entrance exams to university, never let that get in the way of her writing career. Like Angel in her novel of the same name, she began writing as a teenager, finishing her first novel before she was sixteen, and writing constantly ever after that. Unable to get any of her work published until she was in her early thirties, she made up for lost time, however, publishing six novels between 1945 and 1953, and five more between then and 1971. A Game of Hide and Seek, published in 1951 and recently republished as a New York Review Book Classic, is one of her most intensely psychological novels, the story of two young people who spend their time in self-imposed isolation, their paths crossing briefly when, as teenagers they find themselves sharing summer vacations. By the time Harriet Claridge and Vesey Macmillan are eighteen, they are being encouraged to play with Harriet’s younger cousins to keep them busy during their summer vacation in the country, and they sometimes use hide-and-seek games to be together in the loft where they wait for the younger children to find them. They are, however, shy, innocent, and self-conscious, despite Vesey’s uncontrollable malicious streak (which Harriet sometimes thinks she deserves), and so they sit in the loft or the barn “in that dusty stuffiness, among old pots of paint, boxes of bulbs, stacks of cobwebbed deck-chairs, rather far apart and in silence…The only interruption was when one of them timidly swallowed an accumulation of saliva.”
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Here Feiffer tries to do it all. Dedicating this graphic novel to writers Milton Caniff, Will Eisner, Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain and to film directors John Huston, Billy Wilder, and Howard Hawks, and their many classic films (Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce), Feiffer attempts to create a full-scale noir novel, with all its dark action and sad characters, and then bring it to life visually in black and white drawings for dramatic, rather than purely literary, effect. The result is an unusual and challenging novel, full of adventures affecting down-at-the-heels characters, plenty of violence of the “blam, blam, blam” variety, some grim humor, lots of “ha, ha, ha, ha” moments, twists and turns regarding plot and characters, and surprises galore.
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The constant machinations of the Vatican and its hierarchy as they played all sides during the post-war years of World War II emphasize the fact that the Nazi Holocaust – ruthless, coldblooded, and almost impossible to believe in its inhumanity – was only one of the horrors faced by Jews in the 1940s. The Holy See, dedicated to the Gospel of love and charity, and committed to working with the poor, the sick, and the downtrodden, became so involved in international politics and so protective of its own power and relationships within Germany and Italy that it contributed to another whole level of international abuse of the Jews. Pope Pius XII, who had been papal nuncio to Germany from 1917 – 1929, spoke fluent German and had long-standing relationships with all the members of the church hierarchy in Germany, and many of them accompanied him to Rome when he became Pope and stayed with him for the rest of his life. Their attitudes had been formed during their years in Germany, and many people there believed that the Jews’ goal was to destroy Christianity. The institutional anti-Semitism which worked its way into the church is one of the primary subjects of this dramatic and eye-opening novel by former priest James Carroll.
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As I was doing research for a paper to be delivered next month, it struck me that some other readers, perhaps in other parts of the country or from other nations, might find some aspects of this history as fascinating as I did. This colony was settled at almost the same time as Plymouth, but was very different. Though most Americans are familiar with the story of America’s poor pilgrims who made the dangerous voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to settle in Plymouth in 1620, few outside of Massachusetts are aware of the nearly contemporaneous Ipswich colony which began north of Boston in 1629, a colony dramatically different from Plymouth. Joseph B. Felt’s history of three towns, once the single town of Ipswich in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, makes Ipswich come alive. His history is not only good, it’s exciting, filled with unusual and well preserved information about a settlement which began just a few years after the Plymouth colony. Here Felt traces the Ipswich colony from its founding to 1834, creating an incomparable resource covering over two hundred years. He himself, a Congregational minister in what is now Hamilton, from 1824 – 1833, cared greatly about preserving its history, and in writing this book he was clearly conscious of the importance of explaining the thinking of the period and its customs for future generations.
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