Golden Age completes Jane Smiley’s Last Hundred Years trilogy (though it won’t really be the last 100 years until 2020, when things promise to be pretty bleak). I reviewed this last volume for the Minneapolis Star Tribune–as I did the 1st 2 volumes : (Some Luck & Early Warning. I don’t know if Balzac or Trollope would be a good comparison, but it’s a big, fat, all-American epic with all the minutiae & monumentalism that marked the nation’s 20th century. Someday, perhaps, when the world looks like the Wasteland and a different sort of human is scuttling toward a new civilization, someone will stumble upon these volumes and say, “So that was what was happening in what was once called the American Century.”
There’s a nice interview with Smiley in the Paris Review.
Step inside Smiley’s writing room here.
Or, also by way of the NYT, “Jane Smiley’s Horse Country.” http://tinyurl.com/n9hfsr2
