National Families and Private Companies: Narrative Structure and Economies of Exchange in Jane Smiley’s the Last Hundred Years Trilogy

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay argues that the formal structure of Jane Smiley’s The Last Hundred Years Trilogy (2014–2015) integrates interpersonal modes of exchange with modes of exchange constitutive of free market capitalism. Meshing the intimate conventions of the “family saga” with mechanisms associated with neoliberal financial systems, Smiley implicates relationships often perceived as natural and uniquely personal in the large-scale economic regimes driving catastrophic climate change and exploitive income disparities. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Frederic Jameson, Hayden White, and Wendy Brown, I argue that by coupling a quick-paced one chapter/one year format with a circulating third-person narrative perspective, The Last Hundred Years reiterates the conflicts expressed in national discourses that define the U.S. as both a democracy dedicated to shared egalitarian ideals and the world’s primary arena of self-interested striving. If the form of a literary work mediates the contradictions of its age, the unique narrative structure Smiley devises for the Trilogy both reproduces and repudiates capitalist modes of exchange – emotional and material, economic and intimate – expressing her critique of the economic and political systems she holds responsible for bringing humanity to the brink of its “last” hundred years.