She liked vacuuming more than any other household task, and she had gone ahead and let the door-to-door salesman sell her the Kirby, not because she needed a new vacuum cleaner, but because she liked having two, one at each end of the house. Here is an extract from the 1980 chapter: “Lilian was vacuuming. Smiley’s century thus far is defined by a flourishing banality: inessential menus, details about clothes, ruminations on crop yields. She is one of several characters (including Arthur, who works for the CIA, and his sympathetic daughter Debbie) who might have detained us were extra time allotted them, but they exist like fragments from unwritten novels. As we plough on through the years (in Iowa there is a lot of ploughing), we are kept conscientiously updated on the key events and people in each year: the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam war, the advent of Aids – each ticked off while Smiley’s characters struggle to signify.įrank Langdon, the wildest card in the family pack, marries Andy, a woman who suffers from chronic emptiness and, disconnected from her emotions, is seduced by her psychoanalyst. The requirements of the calendar restrict the development of drama and do her imagination no favours. Hers is an ambitious marathon and a hugely miscalculated contrivance. Smiley’s contemporary, Marilynne Robinson, in her painstaking Iowan trilogy (its last part, Lila, was published last year), makes a virtue of slowness.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |