Finished: Early Warnings (Smiley) The second book in a planned trilogy about The Langdons, an Iowa farming family, and how their lives evolve (in this one) from the 1950's to the 1980's. Quite a thought-provoking book that I think I might have liked more than the first one! This book opens in 1953 with the funeral of Walter Langdon, the patriarch of the first book, Some Luck. His widow, Rosanna, remains as a cohesive presence throughout most of Early Warnings, but this story focuses more on Walter and Rosanna's children, Frank, Joe, Lillian, Henry and Claire, and their relationships and children. As it ends, most of those grandchildren of Rosanna and Walter have grown and began having children of their own! Both Rosanna and her activist sister, Eloise, die in the book of relative old age...Rosanna, content with her life and happy with her growing family...and Eloise, regretting the communist activism of her youth and wondering if she totally wasted her life. Anyway, I couldn't possibly recap the whole book, but must give a brief summary so I can come back and read this before reading the third book and remember where we left off. :-)

Frank and his very remote wife, Andy, are still married and stay so throughout the book, even though Frank briefly resumes his affair with Lydia "the love of his life" whore from the first book...and even though Andy has sexual relations with her "out there" therapist while trying to figure herself out. Never one to be maternal to her children, she ends up being a more loving grandmother than mother. And Frank, always the cynical, standoffish, judgemental person, also has trouble relating to his own children who he never feels live up to his own intelligence or expectations. He's much nicer in later years to his children's spouses. Go figure. Anyway, their children are Janet (Janny), and the twins, Michael and Richie. They are all rather doomed from the start with no loving role models, but Janny finds nurturing in her Aunt Lillian's family. The boys just grow up as competitive, sometimes near violent, hellions, which Frank encourages in them at a very early age. Janny does a stint in California and ends up going to the church of the Reverend Jones, nearly buying into the cult, but she pulls herself back just in time to avoid the trip to Guyana! By the end of the book, all the kids have spouses and jobs and seem relatively happy in their own lives...though there will always be that competitive edge between the boys. Janny is married to up and coming computer guy, Jared, with her own daughter, Emily. Michael is married to super rich Loretta with three small children. And, Richie is married to longtime Jewish girlfriend, Ivy, when the book ends. Andy seems to be thriving as a grandmother, and Frank is called in by a longtime, rich associate to go and do another secret "job" for him.

Joe is the good old boy still back on the farm. He's the one who took over for his father and married the girl down the road, Lois. They live on Lois' old farm with her sister, Minnie. Joe is the perfect, low-key, down-to-earth, always reinvesting farmer, and Lois is the perfect baker, homemaker, calm mother. Their children are Jesse and Annie. Not much story about Annie, but Jesse is going to follow in his father's footsteps with the farm. He's now married to Jennifer and they have two sons, Guthrie and Perky. Jesse does become enamored of his adventurous Uncle Frank when he came to visit, and his Uncle took him out hunting and filled him with all his childhood and war stories. This encourages Jesse to actually go to college and see a little bit of the world before settling down back home. Oh, and Frank does completely pay for Joe and Jesse to buy the farm adjacent to theirs that they'd always farmed with their neighbor when that neighbor dies. Franks's not stingy with his money. Oh yes, Frank is rich! So, as we leave Joe and Lois in the 80's the farm crisis is happening and Joe's farm is worth about a third as much as it was. We'll see what transpires in book three!

Lillian is still happily married to CIA guy Arthur. They have four children, Tim, Debbie, Dean and Tina. Lillian is a good mom, but she does rather let her kids run a bit wild. Arthur definitely feels the stress of his job which goes from surviving the tricky cold war to helping decide if the US should bomb Iran, and everything in between. He's so stressed, in fact, that he tries to commit suicide at one point when the kids are older and he ends up being treated in a hospital with shock therapy and sent home. He continues to work, but it's not as stressful. In the meantime, Tim is a wild thing, pretty uncontrollable...alot like his Uncle Frank, he's told. He ends up having a secret relationship with Debbie's best friend, the equestrian riding Fiona, and has one "oops" sex experience with her before he heads off to college that leaves you wondering if she could have become pregnant. Tim flunks out of college and signs up for the military where he is promptly shipped to Vietnam. It's not long before Tim is killed, and we have our first tragedy of this book. :-( Lillian and Arthur are in shock, but push forward with their other children. Debbie is devastated, but continues on with her life. She loves horses but was always at the mercy of riding Fiona's horses, and when Fiona goes off to college, that relationship fizzles out. Debbie ends up married with two kids of her own, Carlie and Kevvie. She talks to her mom on the phone every day. There's not much story about Dean or Tina, but they are both alive and well and maybe will be more prominently featured in the third book. The second tragedy for this family is that Lillian discovers a breast lump and though she goes through chemo, radiation, double mastectomy, etc., she finally succumbs to breast cancer in her fifties. Lillian has been the thread that has held all the siblings and children together since her own mother, Rosanna, passed away, so it is heart wrenching when she dies. Of course, Arthur is beside himself, and at the end of the book, he's pretty much a shell of his former self, but he's still got his government connections, and he's in constant touch with his three remaining children and his grandchildren.

Henry is the son who was all smarts and books growing up. He goes on to get his PhD I'm pretty sure? In some type of medieval archaeology or something, and he's teaching college. He spends many years crushing on his own female cousin, Rosa, Eloise's daughter...just to discover at some point that he's actually gay! He has a couple of steady relationships with younger guys throughout the book, but he's never been an extrovert, so those end up falling by the wayside. He's just on the cusp of AIDS, and is glad that he was never promiscuous when it comes to light. He does see a weird sore on his gum one night while brushing his teeth and panics, but then realizes it was a popcorn kernel that he missed! Perhaps he will be more involved in an AIDS story in the third book.

Claire is the baby of the family and was always closer to her father, Walter, than her mother, Rosanna. She was also very close to Henry. She ends up married to a very controlling doctor, Paul, and has two boys, Grayson and Bradley. Paul is so demanding and picky about every single detail of their lives, that Claire feels stifled after a few years. The boys have grown up respecting, or maybe fearing, their father all their lives, so Claire feels like she's not even needed around the house. She has a couple of secret affairs, and finally when the boys are teenagers, she actually stands up to Paul one night about something trivial and he gets so angry that he hits her! Of course, the boys don't see it, so they're still a little confused when she starts divorce proceedings, but Paul won't hear of it. Not until three years later will he divorce her when he actually finds someone younger to put up with him. Claire is living on her own, working and going to college when we leave her in the 80's...oh, and she seems to actually have a better relationship with her college-aged sons.

And then...there is Charlie! Charlie is a character that is introduced but we never know who he's related to. He's born in 1965 and we see him in Kindergarten, with his little name tag...and late elementary school as he becomes a good swimmer and diver...and at 16 when he discovers the book The Once and Future King and reads it all night, and then again as a 20 year old who loves the outdoors who is moving out to Colorado with his girlfriend to work at an outdoors adventure shop. Charlie is adopted. In a bizarre coincidence, Frank actually spies Charlie one day when Frank goes to Aspen on that mysterious business for the rich guy. It's like looking in a mirror 40 years ago, he thinks. He goes and buys a pair of hiking boots from Charlie and can't get over the resemblance. He becomes convinced that Charlie must be his son by his old mistress, Lydia. He gets Charlie's license plate and asks Arthur to do some secret CIA research on him. What Arthur finds is not at all what either Franks OR Arthur expected. Charlie is not Frank's son...he's Tim's son, and Arthur's grandson! Sure enough, Fiona had become pregnant on that one night all those years ago before Tim headed to college and Fiona had given the baby up for adoption! Charlie's adoptive mother, having always been honest with him, tells him when she finds out that Arthur was inquiring about him. At the end of the book Charlie calls Arthur! Charlie is a genuinely nice person and says he always wished he was from a big family. The book ends with Arthur and Tim's siblings wondering what it will be like to meet Charlie.

I'm kind of now looking forward to the third book! I guess it will take all these people with their good qualities and their flaws right into our time period! :-) Great summer read this one was!