![]() Golden girl Lillian marries a government employee who gets Frank involved in spying on suspected communist agents after the war-ironic, since Rosanna’s sister Eloise is a Trotskyist. Steady, sensitive Joe stays home on the farm, its perennial round of backbreaking labor somewhat alleviated by such innovations as tractors and commercial fertilizer. Smart, charismatic Frank leaves home for college and the Army. (The sardonic folk tale “Lucky Hans” is retold several times.) The Langdons raise five children to varied destinies. The freakish accidental death of a toddler daughter is the only incident here that really justifies Walter’s apprehensions (it wouldn’t be a Smiley novel without at least one cruel twist of fate), but underpinning the comparatively placid unfolding of three decades is farm folks’ knowledge that disaster is always one bad crop away, and luck is never to be relied on. Milk prices are down, and anyway “worry-shading-into-alarm Walter’s ever-present state,” thinks wife Rosanna. We first meet Walter Langdon in 1920 as he anxiously surveys his fields. ![]() Smiley ( Private Life, 2010, etc.) follows an Iowa farm family through the thick of the 20th century. ![]()
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