In Thompson's unforgettable, offbeat novel, an extended Iowa family struggles for emotional and economic stability over three decades, beginning with a modest Lutheran wedding in 1983 and ending with a bittersweet homecoming.An Illinois writer who has drawn acclaim for story collections includingDo Not Deny Me (2009) andWho Do You Love(1999) and novels includingCity Boy(2004) andWide Blue Yonder(2003), Thompson has crafted a dazzling book that works both as an epic page-turner and a series of tightly focused, chronologically arranged stories. Long before the recent recession, the Ericksons, a family of Norwegian descent based in the town of Grenada, are up against itboth as part of a farm community and through ties to the banking community that's under violent threat from foreclosed farmers. As the Ericksons' story unfolds, marital problems, alcoholism, posttraumatic stress syndrome and a horrific car accident leave their mark. Among the siblings, Ryan, whose ponytailed academic hopes were derailed by an incident with a political-science student in Chicago, has succeeded in computer programming only to find himself on a career bubble. A second chance with an old girlfriend proves more ill-advised than the first. Torrie, the bright upstart in the family, suffers a devastating brain injury in the car accident. Cousin Chip is a maladjusted Vietnam veteran just waiting to go off. For all the setbacks the family suffers, their strong ties to each other and their geographical roots ultimately lift them above circumstance. And there are enough unexpected turns, foremost Torrie's awakening as a visionary photographer, to complicate any lessons about fate. Thompson's ability to put these characters empathically on the page, in their special setting, over an extended period of years, with just the right dose of dark humor, rivals Richard Russo's. Touted as her commercial breakthrough, the novelis a powerful reflection on middle American lifeon the changes wrought by the passing years and the values that endure.A masterful wide-angle portrait of an Iowa family over three decades.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

ABOUT a third of the way into "The Year We Left Home," Jean Thompson's 10th book of fiction, the Erickson family of Grenada, Iowa, attends - along with much of the town - the funeral of a beloved great aunt. Torrie, the Erickson's 17-year-old daughter, arrives late to the church, an offense she knows will strain her already volatile relations with her mother; by the time she gets there, the only empty seats are up in the choir loft. From that height, as the pastor delivers the eulogy, she can see her family in the pews below, angry and worried over her seeming absence, but they cannot see her: "Her mother was trying to look behind her, look around the sanctuary. For Torrie, most likely. . . . If she was little, like Matthew" - her nephew - "she could just start hollering, Hey! I'm up here! It was a little creepy, her whole family down below her wondering where she was, and her right there all along." By this time it has dawned on the reader, though understandably not on Torrie herself, that what she is witnessing "down below" is not so much Great-Aunt Martha's funeral as a kind of prefiguration of her own. Thompson eventually makes good on that bit of foreshadowing, though in a more offbeat way than one would have predicted. And it's this sense of the familiar revivified - of knowing what's coming yet being emotionally outflanked by it anyway - that best characterizes "The Year We Left Home," an extraordinarily warm-hearted novel whose impressive humanity and lightness of touch refresh some narrative elements so abundantly precedented that most fiction writers would have been afraid to go near them. The novel spans 30 years; most of that time elapses in the breaks between chapters, each of which tends toward a storylike economy of action. We first meet the Ericksons in 1973, at the wedding of the family's eldest child, Anita, a small-town beauty for whom marriage and motherhood ultimately become traps more than prizes; her husband is not just a drinker and a poor father but, horribile dictu, a banker who forecloses on local farms even when those farms are owned by Erickson friends or relations. But the bulk of the novel is given over to the Ericksons' son Ryan, kind but seemingly always a little too smart for his environment, whose life becomes something of a canvas for the history of the period. In perhaps the novel's best chapter, he brings his college girlfriend Janine - a poetry student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop - home to meet the family, cringing with pre-emptive embarrassment: "His mother set out glasses of iced tea and a bowl of pretzel sticks, his sister was keeping herself busy looking into the refrigerator. He hadn't thought how weird it would be to have Janine sitting at the same table where he'd eaten cereal when he was a kid. The oak-veneer cupboards were marked with years of fingerprints, scrubbed down and reappearing again and again with the persistence of ghosts. Here were the same yellow-striped plates and cloudy-glass salt and pepper shakers, the same slant of afternoon light making the air in the room turn slow and brown. Everything here was familiar, a comfort to him, but at the same time he wondered how long he'd have to sit and endure it." In the end, it is Janine who is so embarrassed by Ryan's behavior toward his family, to whom he clearly considers himself superior, that she takes off in their shared car and strands him at home. Ryan, who has to explain to his skeptical father what the phrase "political science" means, goes on to become a politically committed graduate student and teaching assistant (the course of his downfall, involving an undergraduate girl, is again both predictable in its contours and surprising in its details), and then, in an unlikely career progression, a computer software designer, an occupation in which he succeeds handsomely. At every step, though, he stays grounded by keeping in touch with his cousin Chip, a Vietnam veteran whose latent tendency to screw up has only been exacerbated by his wartime experiences. Those, too, escape cliché, mostly by remaining vague; indeed, the most gruesome story Chip tells is tempered by his own frightening inability to recall whether he's describing something he actually did, or merely something he heard about. The novel's sweep is geographic as well as chronological - it's set in Reno, Chicago, Seattle, even Mexico and Italy - but little Grenada, Iowa, remains its dramatic and emotional hub. At its best, with its episodic, home-centered structure, its stealthy gallop through time and its distribution of point-of-view duties among the increasingly estranged members of a nuclear family, "The Year We Left Home" invites, and withstands, comparisons to Evan S. Connell's novels "Mrs. Bridge" and "Mr. Bridge," two (or really one) of the great American fictions of the last century. The elements of Thompson's novel that might fairly, if ungenerously, be described as stock - the damaged, struggling Vietnam vet; the auction at the foreclosed farm; the young mother who wonders where it all went wrong; the older mother who responds to chaos by trying to feed everybody; the middle-aged man who takes a mistress and then realizes what he had all along - somehow manage to constitute a list not of weaknesses but of triumphs. By rescuing the particular from the universal in transparent prose and with sympathetic wit, Thompson takes these narrative puppets and turns them, Geppetto-like, into real boys. EXPANSIVE historical novels often have a stiffly formal relationship with the history of the time in which their fictional characters live, and this one is no exception: a lot of name-checking goes on (references to the president as "the peanut farmer"), a lot of glancing references to phenomena like "the tech bubble" that have all the detailed verisimilitude of someone sticking pins in a map. There are some surprising colloquial mistakes too, as when a college student in 1981 praises the movie "Taxi Driver" as "tight." But all of that seems secondary to Thompson anyway - much more setting than subject - and she keeps her characters' nondomestic lives almost entirely offstage: we never see the banker at the bank, we never see the computer programmer programming a computer, etc. What "The Year We Left Home" amounts to, with its focus on the family, is a socially panoramic novel with almost all of the "social" taken out of it - a much savvier and more interesting strategy than it may sound. With the decades' fluctuations little more than heavy weather outside the walls of the house, what one is left with is a sense of how provisional it all was anyway, and how fast it all went by. Jonathan Dee's most recent novel is "The Privileges."

Bookended by two wars-Vietnam and Iraq-Thompson's third novel (after the collection Do Not Deny Me) sketches the travails of an Iowa family over three decades. Matriarch Audrey neatly sums up the episodic novel's grand theme: "she'd been born into one world, hopeful and normal, and now she lived in another, full of sadness and failure." The novel opens as oldest daughter Anita, the beauty of the family, celebrates her marriage. Over the years, however, Anita confronts dissatisfaction with herself and disillusionment with her pompous husband. Her younger brother, Ryan, a high school senior as the novel opens, longs to escape his rural roots, dating a hippie poet and majoring in political science before realizing that the farmers who came before him might hold more relevance than he'd imagined. Cousin Chip comes back from Vietnam troubled and aimless, his wanderings from Seattle to Reno, Nev., to Veracruz, Mexico, offering a parallel to the spiritual restlessness all the other characters feel. Told from the point of view of more than a half-dozen characters, the vignettes that make up the narrative are generally powerful in isolation, but as a whole fail to develop into anything more than a series of snapshots of a family touched by time and tragedy. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* In her third novel, superb heartland writer Thompson (Do Not Deny Me, 2009) takes a slide-show approach to the multigenerational family saga. Each episodic chapter is a finely crafted story in its own right that dramatically advances the lives of her compelling characters. Iowa is the home base, the Erikson family is the nucleus, and weddings, a funeral, and traumas intimate and societal stoke unexpected showdowns and reversals as the novel subtly embodies the roller coaster of American life and its booms and busts in the years bracketed by the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Anita, married to an alcoholic banker, suffers pangs of guilt as her cousins become casualties of the 1980s family-farm crisis. Ryan naively screws up his shot at academia; makes it big in the new, soon-to-be rampant information technology industry; and plays straight man to his feckless cousin, Chip. Damaged, renegade, but sweet, Chip darn near steals the show in wild scenes in the Nevada desert and Seattle on the Fourth of July. Thompson's pithy humor, redolent details, and knowing compassion have never been sharper or more resounding as her characters' follies and struggles reveal depthless truths about men and women, families and vocations, the lure of away and the gravitational pull of home.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

National Book Award finalist Thompson's third novel (after City Boy and Wide Blue Yonder) spans over three decades as it explores the subtle changes in one family from small-town Iowa. The novel opens as oldest daughter Anita marries a banker "outsider" from Colorado, hoping only to start a family as her younger brother, Ryan, idealistically dreams of escaping to college. Their cousin, Chip, returns home from Vietnam damaged but still an eccentric, roving restlessly from Seattle to Mexico. Matriarch Audrey wants only happiness for her brood, which is ultimately derailed by Ryan's growing dissatisfaction, Anita's failing marriage, and youngest sister Torrie's life-changing accident. Verdict In this episodic novel told from multiple viewpoints, the individual scenes are powerful and are imbued with great detail. Yet, as a whole, these episodes do not develop into more than scattered chapters in the life of an ordinary family. Nonetheless, this will appeal to readers of literary fiction.-Mara Dabrishus, Ursuline Coll. Lib., Pepper Pike, OH (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.