‘Lucky’ is a delightful trip through the 20th century’s greatest hits

Jodie is an only child growing up in St. Louis, the product of an affair between her mother, a onetime aspiring musical performer, and a married man-about-town no longer in the picture. Jodie’s grandparents live in the neighborhood, as do an aunt, a cousin — the charming, guitar-playing Brucie — and her Uncle Drew, a financial wizard who places a bet for her at the horse races, netting her a roll of $2 bills that gives her story of luck its start. Again and again throughout the book Jodie will return to that roll of bills, which assumes a talismanic charm as she goes to college to study music, joins a band, writes songs and cuts a record successful enough (with the wise advice of Uncle Drew) to free her of financial concerns for the rest of her songwriting, affair-having, house-buying, traveling, occasionally performing life.

All along, Jodie details her movements so meticulously that you could probably find your way around many St. Louis neighborhoods (and a few in England) with the novel in hand. This level of detail can appear gratuitous, but it comes to seem critical to Jodie’s character, who is always observing, from a slight distance, even what she herself does. Much of what she sees becomes grist for a song, but eventually you understand, as she does, that she is trying to figure out how to be in the world.

In high school she sits “on the john in the girls’ bathroom and listen[s] to the others gossip,” figuring “out a way to stay out of their conversations.” In college, she eavesdrops on her two roommates from Philadelphia talking about sex. Later, she makes an effort: “I watched how people reacted to and greeted one another. I also paid attention to the people who were walking together — how they talked and what their body language was. Then I would walk past a store window and observe myself.” Indeed, in time, she has “learned to show an interest in people and to feel a connection.”

This is life as a lesson in how to live, for which you must write your own instructions as you go along. Sometimes an insight emerges, sometimes a song, sometimes an epiphany, and it’s hard to say why, as when Jodie tells us that observing the behavior of a bird “changed my life,” or that the way a friend “talked about … things made me believe that life goes on.” Luckily, this is Jane Smiley, so the details, the insights, the songs — those she writes, and the dizzying assortment she mentions — are entertaining enough to follow.

In the Last Hundred Years Trilogy, which ran from around 1920 to 2020, Smiley viewed the American century through the filter of one family, whose members managed to experience or witness virtually every major event or trend encompassed by those years. Similarly, “Lucky” distills nearly a century through one character’s life — a life that in its general shape and many particulars seems to track with Smiley’s own. Which makes the late appearance of an even more Smiley-like character — a gawky girl who went to high school with Jodie and ended up publishing a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a farm and one set in Greenland in the Middle Ages — somewhat trippy, only to be out-tripped by one last narrative twist that it would be unfair to give away.

And after Jane and Jodie and any remaining J’s get to our own dark days, and to “Lucky’s” vision of an even darker future, a twist — please, a full-scale dislocation! — is precisely what we need.

It’s a fitting conclusion to a novel whose narrator tells us that “the great enigma … was the sense you have, that comes and goes, of who you are, what the self is.”

Ellen Akins is the author of four novels and a collection of stories, “World Like a Knife.”

Lucky

By Jane Smiley

Knopf. 384 pp. $29