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.
