It all starts on a farm in the midwest, which is clung on to almost to the very end of the novel the children go out into the world, and their lives become steadily more virtual, less connected to the world of the soil. The novel, of which Golden Age makes up the last third following Some Luck and Early Warning, has taken on a colossal subject: the life of a large and multiplying family from 1920 to a projected 2020. The separate volumes don’t have a distinct flavour in the way that novel sequences by Proust or AS Byatt have they certainly can’t be read independently, in the way that Anthony Powell’s sequence can. In fact, it is a single novel of half a million words or so. In the last year and a half, she has been publishing what has been described as a trilogy of novels under the title The Last Hundred Years. Her reach is much broader than most novelists she can be forgiven for wanting to see how far, really, that reach extends. In Smiley’s case, she has used the business and pleasure of horse-racing in Horse Heaven, and a slightly ramshackle midwestern university in the sublime Moo, to write about how people connect, and how they depend on each other. In the past, she has excelled with novels that use a social nexus to explore a broad spread of different people, in exactly the way that Dickens could pull the whole of London around the debtors’ prison in Little Dorrit. Jane Smiley might be the perfect candidate to write a truly panoramic novel about a vast subject.

Jane smiley trilogy