Some Luck: A novel by Jane Smiley

Author:Jane Smiley [Smiley, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385350396
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

AT THE BEGINNING of the third quarter, Frank got a job that paid more, one that would keep him in Ames through the summer. Since he planned to move back into his tent, he expected to save quite a bit of money. His boss, who was an assistant professor in the Chemistry Department, wanted to burn cornstalks in a way that would make them usable for gunpowder. Frank foresaw that when the gunpowder was perfected, he and his boss, Professor Cullhane, would put it to use. But it was not perfected yet. It was an interesting idea, though—a field of corn as a weapon.

Frank saw himself as something of a ghost around the campus. He had given up all ideas of Sigma Chi or Sigma Nu. He didn’t mind the kids in his classes and liked walking across the campus with this one or that one—he had retained his habit of being nice to all the girls, and so he always had someone to walk with. He was good at carrying books, or, since he had brought the cruiser back from the farm, riding a girl to the library. There was one girl, Annie Haines, in his history class, who liked to sit on his handlebars and be pedaled around town. She was pretty brave, and once in a while he kissed her, but that was all. She didn’t know where he lived, though if she’d looked out of her window in her freshman dorm rooms, she would have seen the rooming house across Lincoln Way where his room was. But it suited him that no one knew where he lived other than Lawrence, and Lawrence was sworn to secrecy. Lawrence kept the secret, too—not because he honored Frank’s wishes, but because he liked secrets. The reason Frank didn’t try to join a fraternity was that, apart from Lawrence and the girls, his fellow students interested him only for observation.

He wrote two essays for Lawrence. One was about the Russian Revolution and Trotsky, Lenin, and Stalin. This one was easy to write—all he had to do was reproduce Julius’s “line” on Trotsky, that while he was out in the field during the last year of Lenin’s life, when Lenin was so debilitated by strokes, Trotsky was doing the real work of running the army and taking care of administrative business, but Stalin was back in the Kremlin, extending his influence over everyone in the Politburo. Stalin’s betrayal of Trotsky only prefigured his betrayal of his erstwhile colleagues and the revolution itself. Lawrence received an A on the essay, and was told that his thinking was “Very astute. You’ve been paying better attention than I thought, Mr. Field.” In the second essay, “Lawrence” wrote about Richard III. He compared the feuds between the House of Lancaster and the House of York to the feuds in the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, and likened Richard to Stalin, “even in terms of height and looks.” He ended the paper with a few

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