This level of detail can appear gratuitous, but it comes to seem critical to Jodie’s character, who is always observing, from a slight distance, even what she herself does ... The details, the insights, the songs — those she writes, and the dizzying assortment she mentions — are entertaining enough to follow.
The song titles and their accompanying lyrics are well observed... but as often happens in fiction, the band names — the Scats, the Ceiling Fan Fliers and the Garter Belts — aren’t ... [Jodie's] life in music is an impossible fantasia ... Just when the reader is hoping for a satisfying fade, the epilogue takes a wild left swerve. It’s as if Smiley has awakened from a trance and sought to distance herself from everything that’s gone before with a little bad-faith bargain-basement postmodernism.
Lucky is framed as a rock ’n’ roll novel, but it’s a tricky and surprising one. Smiley seems determined to upend the conventions of the genre ... Lucky, much like Smiley’s epic the Last Hundred Years trilogy, operates at a deliberately low boil. Life and death flow in and out, and Smiley observes it clearly but empathetically.
Smiley has fun writing her protagonist’s smart song lyrics, but it is the lingering, poetic, all-but excessively detailed descriptions of every setting and turn of mind that make this slow-brewing, meditative tale of temperament, choice, and creativity spellbinding ... Then, just as the curtain is about to fall on this musing, compassionate, gently rueful, and melancholy artist, Smiley orchestrates a seismic twist of staggering magnitude.
At its close, the novel takes an apocalyptic leap into the near future ... 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.
Tender if uneven ... What’s riling, however, is Smiley’s choice to extend the narrative into the future ... Though Smiley is known for snappier work than this one, it’s plenty engrossing.
