Louis Bayard blends historical narrative and otherworldly mystery in his reimagining of Theodore and Kermit Roosevelt’s 1914 Amazon expedition.

What was the initial inspiration for Roosevelt’s Beast?
That’s a bit shrouded in mystery. All I can remember is standing in a Borders— that’s how long ago this was—and thinking: “Wait, didn’t Teddy Roosevelt go on some crazy journey through the Amazon jungle?” 

At that point, I hadn’t yet read Candace Millard’s The River of Doubt, so I didn’t know how close Roosevelt came to death or how harrowing that journey really was—backbreaking labor, disease, starvation, drowning. The only thing I had, really, was a question. What would that experience have done to Roosevelt’s mind—or, to be metaphysical about it, his soul? The rest of the book just flowed from there. 

Did you get the chance to see the Rio Roosevelt for yourself?
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from writing historical novels, it’s how elusive the past can be. You can go to Paris, you can go to London, and I’ve done that, but if you want to reconstruct Napoleonic Paris or Victorian London, you have to head back to the library. And that’s what I did with Roosevelt’s Beast. I immersed myself in primary sources until I had the clearest possible picture of Teddy Roosevelt’s jungle. (Plus I’m fortunate to live in a city that gets pretty damned tropical in the summer.)

What made you decide to focus your novel on Kermit instead of his much more famous father, Theodore Roosevelt?
I’m always looking for the blanks in the historical canvas—the people and things that nobody really knows about. When it comes to the Roosevelts, we know a hell of a lot about Teddy, but Kermit remains a mystery. Here was this gifted, courageous, accomplished young man who should have had a golden career—a golden life—and instead he lost his way. And to this day, nobody can say why. Even his own family didn’t know why. So this book is an effort to figure out, at both the psychological and symbolic levels, what happened. 

The beast in this story is quite mythical and supernatural in nature—is the beast based on any particular Amazonian or Brazilian legends?
I refer in the book to the Brazilian figure of Curupira, who supposedly defends the forest and its creatures from invaders. But I think all legends, no matter how local, draw on the same notes. Terror and the sublime, in some combination.

Many have noted echoes of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in your novel—was this particularly inspirational?
I can’t imagine a writer who wouldn’t be inspired by it, it’s such an extraordinary work. What I particularly love is how Conrad keeps buzzing around the central mystery, coming at it in fragments, but never making the grand definitive statement. Even that famous line—“The horror! The horror!”—that’s an open-ended line. The horror of what? Conrad leaves it for us to decide. 

You have written pieces for CBS News and Salon about your experiences with depression: do you personally identify with Kermit, who was also diagnosed?
Yeah, that part of the book required zero research on my part. And it makes perfect sense to me, by the way, that he would have medicated himself with alcohol because, in those days, what else was there? You begin to understand why alcohol was such a force in American life—far more than it is today.

From Mr. Timothy on, many of your novels have dealt with complicated father-son relationships, and this one is no exception. Why are you drawn to this particular dynamic? Do you have a favorite father-son relationship in literature?
I do keep coming back to that theme, and I’m not sure why. Maybe because being a father is always kicking my ass. It’s the one job I never seem to master. On the page, maybe I can get it right. 

As for fathers and sons in literature, it’s hard to pick just one. The Road was pretty damn beautiful. The Brothers Karamazov. Seize the Day. Gloucester and Edgar in King Lear. If I can pluck from the film medium, Vittorio de Sica’s The Bicycle Thief has a father-son relationship that will destroy you. 

What do you love most about writing mysteries?
They’re always in motion. Which is a great way to get your characters in motion—and to address the same themes that “serious” literature does, only without calling a lot of attention to yourself. I guess mysteries save me from ponderousness.

When teaching creative writing to university students, what’s the one piece of advice you try most to impart?
Put the story first. I find that young writers, in that first intoxication of language, want to create all these magical word-spells, and the spells don’t work unless there’s something to anchor them. If you get the story right, the poetry comes out of it naturally. You don’t have to lift a finger.

What project are you working on next?
I’m writing a young-adult novel, also historical, with a teenaged female protagonist. A daughter this time! I can’t wait.

Novelist Ayelet Waldman takes a detour from contemporary fiction in her latest book, Love & Treasure. The novel is something of a triptych, weaving three disparate stories together through their shared connection to one of history’s darkest moments: the Holocaust. We asked Waldman a few questions about this compelling story.

This novel is a treasure trove of information about the early suffragette movement, the Gold Train and the art appraisal process. How much time did you spend researching, and where did you draw the line between research enriching your novel and distracting you from writing it?
Research is so much more fun than writing that it can be a delicious trap. I began this novel with research. I found the story of the Gold Train, and then began reading about Budapest. Very quickly I realized I wanted to set some part of the story during the period immediately before World War I, a period of great security for the Jews of Budapest. That’s pretty much all I knew when I packed my bags for Budapest and Salzburg. 

"When writing historical fiction—really, all fiction—research must deepen and contextualize without distracting."

It was in Budapest that I learned about the International Women’s Suffrage Conference, which inspired the third section of the novel. In Salzburg I learned about the DP camps, and then visiting Dachau I found out more about the fate of Hungary’s Jews. That was enough for me to begin the novel. I kept researching throughout, but I forced myself to write at the same time, both because then my research could be more focused, and because otherwise I knew I could luxuriate in research for decades and never begin the hard work of writing the novel.

When writing historical fiction—really, all fiction—research must deepen and contextualize without distracting. I didn’t want the detail to overwhelm the story, but I also know that historical verisimilitude is one of the great pleasures of reading historical fiction. 

With its three very disparate points of view, the novel at times feels like three interconnected novellas. Did you write them in order? Which one was the easiest for you to write? The most challenging?
I wrote them in order, though there was a time when I wondered if I should break them up and intersperse them. I quickly decided that that would be confusing, and it would rob the novel of one of its primary pleasures, the suspense in the search for and ultimate discovery of to whom the necklace belonged. 

The 1913 section just spilled out of me in a frantic rush. I have no idea where the voice of the psychoanalyst came from. It was like he was lying in wait for me for years, hovering anxiously, looking for a chance to be brought to life. 

The hardest part was definitely the contemporary section. It needed to stand up to the other two, both of which had the benefit of being historical. The unfamiliar is inherently fascinating. It takes work to make the familiar interesting. 

Amitai discusses his parents growing up on a Kibbutz and how important it was for his parents (and family) to continue their bloodline and only date Syrian Jews. Having lived on a kibbutz in Israel for a year, was that something you witnessed or felt firsthand?
I lived in Israel for much longer than a year. I started going to the kibbutz on which I based Amitai’s when I was in sixth grade, ultimately spending my summers there in high school, a year there in college, and another (almost) year when I graduated. For six years I dated a boy from the kibbutz whose family history I borrowed for Amitai’s.  The complex covenants of the Syrian Jewish community in the United States was something I read about in a terrific New York Times article in 2007.

Recently, there have been several popular novels that were inspired by real-life paintings (The Goldfinch, The Art Thief). Does the peacock necklace or portrait in the novel exist in real life? 
Nope. I made that all up! 

In one passage in the first section, Ilona stated, “But now I study Hebrew. . . . It took Hitler to make me a good Jew.” You later continue with, “could a religious identity be crafted from anger and disgust?” Could you expand this a bit?
One of the ironies of having experienced as a people a near (but not total) genocide, is that it engenders a feeling of responsibility and of identification. Had the Holocaust never happened, my Jewish identity would probably not be so important to me. But even 70 years later, the idea of being part of the “remnant” influences how I think about and define myself. Because Hitler and his hundreds of thousands of willing compatriots worked so hard to murder us, I feel like I must take a public stand, no matter that I was also raised to be an atheistic, deeply suspicious of religion. 

"Had the Holocaust never happened, my Jewish identity would probably not be so important to me."

Amitai states, “one theft does not make a man a thief.” Do you believe this to be true?
I think it can be true (we aren’t necessarily defined by our worst deeds), but it can also be a convenient thing one tells oneself if one is seeking to avoid responsibility for one’s actions. In the case of Jack, it seems his crime was a minor one, given the historical context. But all minor crimes do, in the end, add up. 

This is your second book with the word “love” in the title. Was this a conscious choice? If not (or even if so), what is the inspiration behind the title?
I actually sort of hate the idea that the two titles share the word “love.” But Love & Treasure was just the perfect title. I couldn’t resist it. I’ve never been a huge fan of the title Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (I didn’t choose it), and I couldn’t bear to sacrifice a really apt and pithy title because of one I wasn’t fond of. 

What are you working on next?
Since finishing the novel, I’ve written no fewer than six TV pilots (none of them picked up), but I have only just recently begun a new novel. It’s too soon really to know what it’s about, but I can say that it, like Love & Treasure, will have both historical and contemporary elements. If things go as planned, there will be sections in the French Riviera immediately before World War II, in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, and in New England in the 1960s.

Author photo by Reenie Raschke

Francine Prose has written more than 20 books, including the National Book Award finalist Blue Angel, so the term “breakout book” doesn’t really apply. But her new historical novel, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, is poised to become her biggest hit yet. Told from various perspectives, the novel pieces together the life of Lou Villars—auto racer, cross-dresser and eventual Nazi sympathizer—against the turbulent backdrop of Jazz Age Paris. We asked Prose a few questions about the new book. Read on to find out about her own double identity and why she writes for readers like herself.

One thing that makes this novel so compelling is the masterful way you blend fact with fiction—it’s not always clear exactly how much of the story is real and how much you have made up.
To be perfectly honest, by the time I got through writing the novel—five years—I was no longer precisely sure how much was “real” and how much I’d made up. Yes, history is a narrative, like fiction, but the one thing I wanted to avoid was what I mostly dislike about the sort of “historical fiction” that puts so much emphasis put on period details that it detracts from the characters—who, I hope, are central in this novel. I see the book as a contemporary novel that happens to be set in the past.

"I see the book as a contemporary novel that happens to be set in the past."

From the title alone, it’s made clear that sex and romance will play a large part in this story, but one of the really exciting things about this novel is its straightforward (and some might feel, quite modern) approach to sexuality and gender politics. Can you talk a about where your inspiration for the Chameleon Club and its little coterie of outcasts and lovers came from?
The inspiration came from a photo by the great Hungarian-French photographer, Brassai, and then a series of photos. Brassai took a lot of pictures at a club called Le Monocle in Paris. Most of its customers were cross-dressers, mostly women. Just lately, I was reading a biography of Jane Bowles, and I found out that during a trip to Paris she’d hung out at Le Monocle. That was very exciting to me: I hadn’t known.

Villain or not, Lou Villars is really the star—she’s complicated, confused, the antithesis of boring, and definitely an enigma. Perhaps most striking, in a book filled with so many voices, she’s also the one main character who doesn’t get to speak for herself. What was the motivation behind that decision?
Lou was by far the hardest character to write, and I tried writing her sections many different ways—first person, second person, in letters, etc., etc. And nothing quite worked. It wasn’t until I hit upon the device of the “biography” that I was able to do it, partly because I was able to pass my problems along: my problems with, and confusions about, such a deeply conflicted and complex character became the biographer’s problems. And her understanding of Lou helped me understand her.

As any book about World War II must, yours takes on the character of Hitler. What was it like to tackle such a prominent, infamous figure within the scope of fiction?
I can’t tell you how much fun it was to write a dinner party scene that included Hitler, and to capture something about the way people describe being in his presence. There’s a book called Hitler’s Table Talk—a transcription of his dinner table monologues—that was very helpful. Hannah Arendt created an enduring controversy when she wrote about the banality of evil, but Hitler was a living example: profoundly evil, shockingly banal.

"I can’t tell you how much fun it was to write a dinner party scene that included Hitler."

One particularly lovely passage is when Gabor, a photographer, talks about how he has cultivated his eye for detail by pounding the pavement and increasing his likelihood of observing the miraculous. Is there a writer’s corollary for those who attempt to capture the world through words rather than pictures?
Same process: pounding the pavement. You just keep looking at the world, overhearing, watching and trying to figure things out.

There’s something about the 1920s and '30s—and definitely about Paris—that people today find endlessly romantic, even with the knowledge of what will historically follow. Why do you think that is?
So much was happening then—in art, in music, in writing. Just to list the artists at work during that period in Paris is stunning. People were finally freeing themselves from the restraints of the 19th century and trying to lead lives that were creative, interesting, adventurous and rewarding.

If you could travel back in time to spend one decade in one city, when and where would you go and why?
Obviously, I’d like to have been in Paris in the 1920s and ‘30s—that’s partly why I had to write a novel in which I could imagine myself back there.

At one point in the novel, a character posits that each of us leads a double life. If this is indeed true, what two lives do you lead?
I’m a writer (being a novelist implies a certain amount of control) and a total slave to my beloved granddaughters.

One bookish tome you have written is entitled Reading Like a Writer. If we were to flip that title, what would you say it means to write like a reader?
Readers (I’m using myself as an example) want to read writing that’s original and persuasive and perhaps even beautiful, and to keep interested in what they’re reading. That’s the reader I write for: the one with the intense interest in prose style and the short attention span.

What resources did you draw upon to write this book? For readers who are interested in learning more about Paris leading up to and during World War II, are there any books you would recommend?
I read a great deal and then forgot almost all of it. There are many fascinating memoirs of the period such as John Glassco’s Memoirs of Montparnasse, as well as history books, especially about Paris between the wars and during the Occupation. Many heroes and heroines of French Resistance have written memoirs. I watched Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympiad for its footage of the Berlin Olympics, and Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity for its marvelous portrayal of France during the war: the collaborationists and the resistance. Two of the most helpful books were And the Show Went On by Alan Riding, and Bad Faith by Carmen Callil.

What are you currently working on?
I’m beginning to think about a new novel—and also writing a brief biography of Peggy Guggenheim, who knew many of the historical figures in my novel; I’m obviously not ready to let go of that time.

RELATED IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of this book. 

World War II-era nurse Claire Randall stumbled through a stone circle into the 18th century—and straight into the hearts of readers, who have gobbled up Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series since its 1991 debut.

Gabaldon returned this summer with Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, the eighth book in the series—and this month the first book, Outlander, has been turned into a TV series that will air on Starz. We asked Gabaldon a few questions about the series and the new book.

Fans can be notoriously picky about screen adaptations of their favorite books. Do you think they’ll be pleased with the upcoming TV adaptation of “Outlander”?
Yes, I do.

What was your favorite moment from the book to see on the screen? 
I won't know until I've seen the show in its entirety. I did, though, tell Sam Heughan during a fan event in L.A. that I was looking forward to seeing him raped and tortured.

As an author, do you worry that the TV series will put increased pressure on you to finish the series, as George R.R. Martin has experienced after the adaptation of “Game of Thrones”?
No. I write much faster than George. No, really—it's not a problem. I have eight books of the series in print! Several of them quite long (meaning that the material could well extend over more than one season). It isn't going to take me eight years to write another book.

Like all your books, Written in My Own Heart’s Blood has a lot of interwoven storylines. Which one was your favorite?
Ah . . . well, I tell you what. Pick up your favorite shirt. Look at the fabric closely. Which thread is your favorite?

If a fabric is well-woven, all the threads will be in the right place, providing support or ornament. Just so in a well-constructed book.

You’ve said that some characters are “mushrooms”—people who just show up in a storyline and run away with it. Were there any of those in the new novel?
Oh, yes. They're always there. I can't tell you about them, though, as so many people have hysterics if they encounter anything they think is a spoiler for the new book.

It seems like every Outlander book is rumored to be the last. Do you see a likely end point?
Rumors, forsooth. It's just silly hysteria, and entirely pointless. I've never said this or that book is the last one. I can't think why people think they have to know how many books there will be in a series—but if some mental compulsion afflicts them, I'm afraid they're out of luck. I don't plan the books out ahead of time, I don't write with an outline, and I don't write in a straight line—so I have no idea.

You write very long books in an era of short attention spans. Have you received any pushback about this? What pleasures do you think longer books afford to readers?
Oh, the publishers used to have fits about the length, but they've pretty much accepted reality of recent years and just deal with it. As for readers with short attention spans, there are plenty of short books out there. It's not my job to worry about What Readers Want; it's my job to write the best book I can, and then people can like it or not, up to them.

Your fans are particularly fervent—a 900-seat auditorium in Portland sold out soon after tickets went on sale, and you just had a fan retreat outside Seattle. Do you have a favorite fan moment?
I have wonderful fans: educated, literate, intelligent, sane (something many of my fellow-authors envy) and amazingly kind. Which is not to say that some of them don't show up at signings with "Da mi basia Mille" tattooed on their rumpuses, or present me with hand knitted teddy bears (in pale blue) playing bagpipes, but I love them all, regardless.

You’ve mentioned your work on a contemporary mystery—is that still something fans can look forward to?
Yes, in the fullness of time.

After decades in the business, what advice do you wish you’d had when you first launched your publishing career?
Actually, I had a lot of great advice from established writers, and do my best to pass it on to new writers. Can't think of anything I should have known but didn't, though.

A portion of this article was originally published in the August 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Readers of Amy Bloom’s riotous new novel, Lucky Us, might want to pack a few snacks and buckle their seatbelts for this highly entertaining ride, which kicks off when half-sisters Eva and Iris hightail it from small-town Ohio to pursue their dreams in Hollywood.

Bloom herself has always loved a good road trip. “My first road trip was the day after I graduated from high school,” she says during a phone interview in which it is clear that her own warmth and humor is the source for much of the wit found in her fiction. “I went with two girlfriends, we borrowed a car from someone’s overly indulgent father, and we drove from Long Island to Vancouver, down the West Coast and back again. And it was great. I always have a positive feeling when I see people getting into a car with a bag of chips. I even told my daughters all they needed to hit the road was 50 bucks and a couple of Tampax.”

I told my daughters all they needed to hit the road was 50 bucks and a couple of Tampax.

At its wildly beating heart, Lucky Us is a novel of rebirth and reinvention told with the kind of candor that Bloom—the author of two previous novels and three short-story collections—is known for. At the age of 12, Eva is abandoned by her mother at her father and half-sister Iris’ house. The teenagers don’t have much in common, except their shared parent, Edgar—and even he isn’t quite who they thought he was. Bloom was intrigued by the idea of writing about sisters.

“I had never written about sisters before. And though I think there are, as always for any writer, lots of sources, I happen to have a sister, and she is six years older than me. We both say we paid almost no attention to each other until she was going off to college. I was crawling around on the floor while she was riding her bike. So the idea of what it is to get to know a sister later, when you don’t have all that shared history, interested me.”

The charismatic Iris shows early talent as a performer, winning every local and regional speech competition, and Eva becomes her loyal sidekick, dresser and confidante. After the girls catch their father trying to steal Iris’ winnings, they hop a Greyhound bus to Hollywood, where Iris hopes to break into the movies. A scandal ensues and the girls are soon back on the road to New York, but this time, via station wagon, with their father in tow. Their friend Francisco, a hair and make-up artist to the stars, finds them jobs as domestics for the Torellis, a wealthy family on Long Island.

But that’s only the beginning of the girls’ madcap adventures: Later in the novel, an orphan is abducted; a friend is accused of being a German spy; and Eva takes a job as a fortune-teller at a local beauty parlor. At times, the book feels almost like a series of outtakes from some screwball comedy—but these are scenes that would have never made it past the censors, like the lushly described party at the home of Hollywood’s most decadent lesbians, or the sisters conspiring to kidnap a little boy from the local Jewish orphanage for Iris’ childless lover. But Bloom’s command of her characters keeps the novel from spilling over into satire just as her judiciously chosen details keep the plot moving forward.

Though she was born in the 1950s, Bloom is as tuned in to the spirit of the 1940s as she was to the 1920s in her award-winning novel Away. Lucky Us gives her a way to look at how life at home provided new opportunities for change and reinvention, especially for women and African Americans.

“Part of what happened when this country went to war are things that would have been unthinkable 10 years earlier,” Bloom explains. “Women not only going to work, but doing difficult physical labor and being in challenging leadership positions—things that the dominant culture had fought against since its founding. Now, it’s true the war ended and we sent those women packing, the war ended and the level of integration between African Americans and the dominant white culture dripped dramatically, but my own sense is that once you open the door, you cannot completely and forever close it again.”

Each chapter of Lucky Us is headed by a song title from the 1940s, drawn from jazz, blues and pop. These evocative headings are both a distillation of the chapter content and reminder of the rich diversity of the times, while also working as representations of some of the decade’s most profound social changes. “This was a time when music was everywhere, and though there were cultural divides, most popular music was heard by everyone. The high school girl, her science teacher, the principal, the custodian and the guy who delivered school supplies all listened to the same music,” Bloom says, adding with a laugh, “I had such a wonderful time choosing these. Can’t carry a tune, but I sure do like to listen.”

Bloom published a complete playlist of the songs on her website, but says, “If you know the songs, that’s a little plus for you, but even if you don’t, the titles are so evocative they still bring something fresh.”

Most of the novel is told from Eva’s wry perspective, but Lucky Us includes letters, both sent and unsent, from the sisters, their father and Gus, who works with them in Long Island, but through a series of unfortunate events, winds up in a German prison camp. The letters move the plot forward, but more importantly, they give the reader an additional glimpse at the inner thoughts of the characters as well as their joys, frustrations and hidden desires.

“I love the epistolary form. There is something very moving to me about letters. The wish to communicate—which is sometimes successful and sometimes not—something happens in the presence of that intention.”

Bloom’s short stories are known for their wise assurance that the very complexity of human expression—conversational, emotional and even sexual—is not only acceptable but also cause for celebration. In addition to the humor and fast-paced high jinks, Lucky Us contains a similar wisdom as it investigates how we engage with our families, both the ones we are born into and the ones we create.

Bloom, who is now the distinguished University Writer-in-Residence at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, also has a master’s in social work and worked as a psychotherapist. She credits her training for giving her empathy for her characters’ deeply human foibles.

“I learned to not interrupt,” she says, “to pay attention to what was said and how, and what was said before and what was said after. I learned to make as few assumptions as possible. To recognize that people are, in their nature, complex. So that training was really useful, especially the listening part. I don’t think you can be a good writer and a bad listener.”

I don’t think you can be a good writer and a bad listener.

About halfway through the novel, Edgar remembers that his mother once told him, “It’s good to be smart, it’s better to be lucky.” But Lucky Us reminds us that not all luck is good luck. As Bloom puts it, “Luck is a roll of the dice and we are all subject to it. So, better to be lucky than smart? Sure. But better to be lucky and smart, so you have a plan when the dice go against you, which they will—sometimes.”

Her playful novel reminds us that life can only be what we make of it and that the biggest setbacks often result in the most gratifying results. Her readers are all the luckier for it.

Author photo by Deborah Feingold

This article was originally published in the August 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The question that will burn in a reader’s mind when she finishes Some Luck, Jane Smiley’s marvelous new novel, is: How long do I have to wait to read the second volume in The Last Hundred Years trilogy?

Jane Smiley laughs heartily when asked. “Well, that’s up to Knopf,” she says during a call to her home in Carmel Valley, California. Smiley is the author of such best-selling novels as Moo and the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres, as well as five works of nonfiction. She says she has already completed all of the volumes in the trilogy, which covers 100 years in the life of one family, with each chapter focusing on a single year.

Smiley is emphatic in her desire that “all three [volumes] come out as soon as possible. I really do feel that it’s one thing, and it’s important for volumes one and two to be in the reader’s mind when he or she is reading volume three.”

Some Luck opens in 1920 with Walter Langdon, on the eve of his 25th birthday, walking the fence lines of his barely-making-it farm near Denby, Iowa. He is thinking about the vicissitudes of farming; the admonishments of his strict father, a more successful and established farmer who lives down the road; his love for his 20-year-old, self-possessed and talkative wife Rosanna; and his five-month-old son, Frank—the first of five children who grow into memorable individuals over the course of the novel, and, presumably, go on in the next two novels to great and less great things. Some Luck closes in 1953, with the Langdon family—responding to social and economic forces arising from the Great Depression and World War II—having mostly abandoned their hometown and moved to the far ends of the country, as so many other Americans did in that era.

The Langdon family diaspora promises much for Smiley’s exploration of 20th-century American culture and politics in future volumes of the trilogy. But in Some Luck, the family is largely homebound. Only Walter and Rosanna’s final child, Claire, for example, is born in a hospital; the rest are born, sometimes excruciatingly, at home. So, with her vivid, tactile depiction of isolated, rural Iowa farm life, Smiley has imaginatively recaptured the dangers and rewards, the play of good luck and bad luck, in a lost way of life.

“I really wanted to take these characters and follow them from babyhood to death,” Smiley says. “And I want the reader to be reminded that there’s so much that we don’t remember, that there’s so much that we don’t know.”

"I really wanted to take these characters and follow them from babyhood to death."

Smiley lived in Iowa for about 24 years as a student and professor and ended up living for a while in a sort of abandoned farmhouse.

“I used to take long walks in the countryside, and I used to think a lot about farming. It became an interest and continued to be an interest as I stayed in Iowa. How we get our food, who grows the food and what the food is made of is central to any culture. . . . The Langdons love the farm, but they hate the farm. They are suspicious of soybeans, but they love oats. It’s an incredible amount of work, yet they feel a great sense of accomplishment. It was a very great pleasure to write about that.”

Smiley describes in some detail the research that went into creating her trilogy—the stacks of books on her office floor and her gratitude to Wikipedia, “which is great for a novelist because it’s OK—in fact it’s better—for your knowledge of something to be partial.” Remarkably, that research is completely subsumed in the consciousness and conversations of her characters.

As a result, Some Luck moves swiftly and assuredly through just over 33 years of the Langford clan’s experiences. Smiley says the novel’s velocity arises from the quirky year-by-year approach she deploys throughout the trilogy.

“Most trilogies are groups of stories that include some of the same characters and then don’t,” she says. “I wanted to write a book about a family, but I wanted it to progress evenly for 100 years. I didn’t know of anybody who had done that before and thought it would be fun to try. That’s the nerdy side of me. I wanted each volume to cover 33¹⁄₃ years and each chapter to be a certain number of pages. The only way I can justify that is that, in a novel with a plot, the plot gives you a form, but in a book that progresses through time, then something as simple as the divisions of the book give you form. I had to do a lot of research, but the energy that was inherent in that form really carried me along.”

Some Luck ends up being a quiet, almost self-effacing, Midwestern tour de force.

Some Luck ends up being a quiet, almost self-effacing, Midwestern tour de force. Smiley writes about farm life, family life and, suggestively, near the end, national political life. There are farming scenes, sex scenes, combat scenes and table-talk scenes.

Smiley says she began with the concept of the trilogy but ended up being swept away by the trajectories of her characters.

“There are three boys and two girls born over the course of 19 years. I wanted to be able to freely enter into everybody’s mind. So I had to be open to their most likely experiences. Frank at his age obviously is going to go off to the Second World War. So I have to be open to male experiences. And there is Lillian, who is the darling child—I’m really quite fond of Lillian—who realizes as she enters high school that she isn’t going to be everybody’s darling.

“I really did want to enter into the minds of the male characters, the female characters, the teenagers, the 20-year olds, the 40-year olds, and that meant I had to go everywhere that they might go.”

Wherever Smiley goes in Some Luck, most readers will willingly follow. Then wait, with bated breath, for her next steps.

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Since its publication last year, Christina Baker Kline’s fifth novel, Orphan Train, which illuminated a little-discussed moment in American history, has fascinated readers. Between 1854 and 1929, trains carried thousands of abandoned children from the East Coast to farmlands in the Midwest. Many were adopted by new families, while others found themselves entering into indentured servitude. Orphan Train intertwines the story of one of these children—Vivian Daly—with that of Molly, a contemporary young woman who has spent her youth in and out of foster care. As a friendship between the two women forms, history is revealed and healing can begin.

The orphan trains ran for many years, but not much has been written about them (at least, not for adults). Why do you think that is?
I think the story has taken a long time to come out, and for people to wrap their heads around what exactly happened and how many people were on these trains, how they got there. The train riders themselves, many of them kept quiet about what happened to them and never told anyone. A lot of people died before relatives even could find out.

Most history is not the history of dispossessed children or the poor. The truth is, this was happening and no one was really writing about it, partly because that wasn’t what was really being written about. It’s only in the 20th century really that the concept of childhood—even of teenage-hood—came into being. Journalists and reporters started uncovering what was happening to poor people in all different kinds of ways. All of this ferment around immigration—and also about Native Americans—was not happening then in the same way. This is a time that people are trying to excavate and figure out what constitutes American history. Even the concept of Columbus Day . . . it feels like a vestige, an evolutionary webbed foot.

Frankly, this story is shocking to us with our 21st-century brains, but it was not shocking in 1920, the idea of sending children to better homes to work, because they were working already.

“The story has been hidden in plain sight in American history. . . . It’s obviously hit a nerve.”

The modern-day storyline shows how things haven’t changed all that much for orphans since the time of trains.
I did a presentation to a room full of social workers, 60 social workers, and one of them said, “We don’t send children on trains anymore, but we do send them all over the state without their knowledge of where they’re going, into homes where they have no idea where it is, to communities they’ve never been in, and the transition is not that different.” The feelings that children have today in the foster care system, even though there are checks and balances in place now, are the same feelings.

This book became a huge word-of-mouth hit since it was published last year. In fact, in reverse of the usual order, it went from paperback original to hardcover. Why do you think that is?
I think that the story has been hidden in plain sight in American history. I think that a lot of people are intrigued by that, that we don’t know about this. I think that the juxtaposition of the contemporary story of a troubled girl . . . to the orphan train-rider a hundred years ago gives it immediacy. You’re not just looking at some sepia-tinted story of a girl from long ago. Immediately you’re faced with what it feels like today to be a child who’s displaced. That creates a lot of room for conversation.

I didn’t do it in a calculated way, thinking that would happen. My publisher had no idea. My agent had no idea. Nobody expected this, for there to be 1.5 million copies in print in 25 countries. It’s obviously hit a nerve.

What are you working on next? Is there another moment in history you’d like to illuminate in this way?
I’m not really a historical novelist. My next novel is inspired by a painting, “Christina’s World” by Andrew Wyeth, and it’s about the girl, the woman in the painting. If you consider the mid-20th century historical, I suppose it is historical fiction, but it’s really a whole different kind of narrative and story.

After seeing how many readers showed up for your session, do you have a fun fan story to share?
What’s most fun for me is when people have gone on adventures with their own families after reading my book. This old guy came up to me at one event—I mean, I’ve had a number of these—but this particular guy, his daughter made him read it. . . . His brother was taken onto the train, and he was adopted. It all came back when he was reading the book. He’d never done anything to try to find out what happened, but he found his brother in California! Not only that, but they’re both members of the Lions Club, and they were a featured story on the cover of the Lions Club magazine a couple of months ago! . . . It was so inspiring and interesting to hear about how the book propelled him to find out about his past. I love hearing those stories.

Who are you most excited to see while you’re here at the Southern Festival of Books?
Well, my good friend Lily King! I love her, and I just read Euphoria, and I loved it.