Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A stroll through recent American history with a modestly successful singer-songwriter. More than three-quarters of Jodie Rattler’s account of her life is a straightforward realistic text, spiked with dry Midwestern humor, about growing up in St. Louis with a single mother supported by a close-knit extended family. Jodie has been lucky, she tells us, since age 6, when her uncle took her to the racetrack and gave her a share of his winnings. That $86 roll stays with her through a musical career that she never has to work at very hard, thanks to a novelty Christmas hit she wrote while still in college in 1969. The royalties bankroll her through the next half-century, including a long trip with a serious love affair in England and a bohemian residency in New York enlivened by 23 lovers (she kept a list). Jodie’s down-to-earth descriptions of writing songs, cutting a few albums, and singing with various bands is reminiscent of Smiley’s nuts-and-bolts dissection of fiction writing in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), as is her blunt narrative voice. Her creator riffs on this similarity with running appearances by “the gawky girl” Jodie knew slightly in high school, unmistakably Smiley, though her name is never mentioned. St. Louis (Smiley’s real-life hometown) is the lovingly rendered setting for the most moving scenes after Jodie moves back to care for her aging grandparents and alcoholic mother. The rest of the locales are more generic, as are the current events dropped in to situate Jodie’s experiences chronologically. At its close, the novel takes an apocalyptic leap into the near future that matches Smiley’s darkest pages in A Thousand Acres (1991) and The Greenlanders (1988). This abrupt change of tone is presumably intended to spotlight the way extremes of every variety from climactic to political have become the norm, but it makes for a jarring conclusion to an otherwise low-key novel. Intelligent and tough-minded, as Smiley’s work always is, but capped by an oddly disjunctive finale. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.