“…Daddy thinks history starts fresh every day, every minute, that time itself begins with the feelings he’s having right now. That’s how he keeps betraying us, why he roars at us with such conviction. We have to stand up to that, and say, at least to ourselves, that what he’s done before is still with us, still right here in this room until there’s true remorse. Nothing will be right until there’s that.” “He looks so, sort of, weakened.” “Weakened is not enough. Destroyed isn’t enough. He’s got to repent and feel humiliation and regret. I won’t be satisfied until he knows what he is.”“Do we know what we are?” “We know we aren’t him. We know that to that degree we don’t yet deserve the lowest circle of hell.”Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer Prize winning A Thousand Acres takes most of its inspiration from King Lear, but works that soil with bountiful quantities of modern nutrients. In the original, the elderly Lear, wanting to retire from his royal duties, seeks to distribute his kingdom among his children, with the largest share going to the daughter who loves him most. (makes you want to smack the guy) However, there is no fool like an old fool and Lear, offended by the simple, if unadorned, honesty of his youngest, Cordelia, and manipulated by the flattery of his elder two, Goneril and Regan, disinherits Cordelia. The play portrays the elder sisters in a very dark light. But how might that tale look through their eyes? Are they really that awful? Maybe Lear had it coming. Maybe Willy the Shake is a bit too locked in to a misogynistic, patriarchal world view to give the ladies a fair…um…shake. Enter Jane Smiley, stage left, to introduce King Lear in the Great Plains.She parks the kingdom in Iowa. Unlike Kinsella’s vision of the place, this version ain’t heaven. Larry Cook is both old and a fool. In a fit of one-upsmanship in the face of his highly manipulative and competitive bff, Harold, Larry decides to step back from his work and hand the farm over to his children. This seems ok, I guess, to the oldest, Ginny (Goneril) and her younger sister Rose (Regan), but the youngest, Caroline (Cordelia), a lawyer, expresses her reservations about how it is being done. This is enough to set off the old guy and he writes her out of the deal, even at one point literally slamming the door in her face. (Don’t let it hit you on the nose on your way out). Caroline is not exactly interested in farming, so the insult is more about personal rejection than lost acreage. Smiley does not offer an exact correspondence of her characters to Shakespeare’s. There will be no Cordelia dying in her father’s arms here, and this Lear appears to gain no wisdom or compassion from his experiences. Ginny is our narrator through the story. She loves her Daddy, and tries to make allowances for his constant verbal abuse and irascibility. In fact she is incapable of standing up to him. Rose despises Larry, and for good cause, as it turns out, but the two sisters had protected Caroline from Larry’s worst inclinations, so her affection for her father is untainted by Ginny and Rose’s darker experience of him. There is major departure here from the source material. Rose and Ginny hardly suck up to pops to gain advantage like their Elizabethan counterparts had. Their husbands do a good job of that though. Ginny genuinely, if misguidedly, loves her father. And even if Rose had been plotting against Larry, well, he really deserved it. But in fact, the sisters are more bewildered recipients of Larry’s surprise largesse than anything else. I set about correcting my friend William Shakespeare—something no sane adult would attempt. I gave the royal family a background and a milieu. I gave the daughters a rationale for their apparently cruel behavior… - Austin Allen quoting Smiley in an article in BigThinkIf Lear were guilty of Larry’s sins, it would certainly alter our view of his daughters’ behavior. And that is one of the points. The Elizabethan sisters are presumed to be incompetent to run anything, because they are female. Smiley points out some of the potential horrors of running a profitable farm, and it is clear that farmers of either gender would be challenged to make a go of it. However, Ginny has always been prevented from doing much with the farm, kept in domestic service her entire life. Rose is a tough cookie, who has endured an abusive husband, but is very much a competent, no-nonsense sort, to a fault. She proudly proclaims that when she wants something, she takes it. Both Rose and Ginny have been poisoned by their environment, both natural and familial. The poisons used on the farm, it is implied, are the reason why Ginny was never able to bring a pregnancy to term, and why Rose has breast cancer. (she has had a mastectomy) How awful is it when one’s identity involves land and the very land that reflects the self has been poisoned? There is something to being rooted to a place. There is comfort in the solidity, reliability, history, pride and maybe even beauty of a place. Generations past may have established a home, a residence, property in a particular location and invested years and lives both molding the land and taking sustenance from it. Their efforts planted the seeds which became the roots from which we spring. But what if the land, the roots themselves are no good? What if the means used to sustain the human/place relationship has fouled both? What if the place that is expected to sustain life drains it instead? Poisoned land = poisoned lives.Does the land define a person? The book opens with a quote: The body repeats the landscape. They are the source of each other and create each other.The landscape is mostly flat, with a central mound from which all can be seen, the division of local land among rival families, yet for all the visibility it is what lies unseen that devours the characters. The difference between appearance and reality, between what is visible and what lies hidden permeates the novel. Ginny talks with her husband about dealing with Larry: “You’re right. I don’t understand him. But a lot of the taking issue that you see is just us trying to figure out how to understand him better. I feel like there’s treacherous undercurrents all the time. I think I’m standing on solid ground, but then I discover there’s something moving underneath it, shifting from place to place. There’s always some mystery. He doesn’t say what he means.”Larry presents to the world as a successful farmer and family man, when in fact, he has been destroying his own land and abusing and, effectively, killing his family at the same time. That he has taken unfair, predatory advantage of his neighbors only adds spice. Ginny recalls a sane childhood with her father, but the reality lies in another field. There is enough mendacity in the air to warrant an EPA alert, and I could not help thinking of another fictional patriarch every time the daughters call their father Daddy.This is a place in which family is held as the pinnacle of human value, but when the Ericson family moved away, when Ginny was a kid, she desperately wanted to leave with them. It is only when Ginny is able to separate herself from the land that she can be her own person. Motherhood and apple pie do not go together much in this view of the heartland. Rose and Ginny’s mother dies young. Rose is afflicted with a dread disease at a very young age and her ability to complete the raising of her children is not certain. Ginny, who takes on some parental responsibility for her nieces, is not as close to them as a real mother might be. In fact, the greatest maternal love Ginny experienced was from Mrs. Ericson. And poison in the well water, it is suggested, prevents her from completing a pregnancy. Not many cards being sent on Mother’s Day in this place. Like Lear, Larry goes a little funny in the head, and doubling down on foolishness, insists on wandering about on his own during a large thunderstorm. (Dick Cheney, anyone, doubling down on torture after the report on its ineffectiveness came out?) He will not listen to reason. Further misery stems from this unfortunate outing. In fact there is an awful lot of misery in this tale, of the short-term, long-term and terminal sorts. Unlike Lear, who at least picked up a bit of compassion and humility from his excesses, Larry learns nothing from his errors. I did get the impression that in presenting what is certainly a feminist look at Lear, the guys come off pretty badly, tarred with a dark brush the way Willie the Shake treated the elder sisters in the original. Harold is totally poisonous, as is Larry. Ginny’s husband seems pretty reasonable a lot of the time, but we are given a much darker view of him later in the tale. In one scene, eager to gain both land and Larry’s blessings, Ty talks to Ginny about dealing with Larry: …you women could handle it better. You could handle him better. You don’t always have to take issue. You ought to let a lot of things slide. which sounds to me a lot like “just lie back and enjoy it.” Ginny thinks of Ty as dumb and passive, whatever his better qualities might be. Rose’s husband is a drunk and an abuser. Even the returning prodigal, the handsome and charming Jess, the one who wants to farm organically and restore some purity to the land, engages in a bit of shtup-and-tell, and ultimately proves less than reliable. So what are we to make of all this? Lear offers a structure but the story seems to be about both feminism and America. The women here, even the tougher and more perceptive ones, have to put up with an unspeakable amount of crap, and are castigated for griping about it. The parallel is to the treatment of the land, which endures a similar abuse, as farming becomes more of a heavily mechanized food production system than something that allows one to feel a connection to the earth. What about readability, characters, does it make sense, can you engage, will you care? A Thousand Acres is a very readable book. This darkly dramatic story flows along at a rapid clip and it will definitely hold your interest. Ginny is our guide through this particular part of Iowa, and will engage your sympathy, although you will want to roll your eyes at some of her behavior. It is understandable how she came to be the way she is, for the most part, and we want her to come out of it all ok. There is a revelation about Ginny’s history that makes one wonder how she could have blocked a particular memory. I suppose it is possible, but it was a stretch to accept. Battles are engaged, dirt is done, plots are hatched, backs are stabbed, poison is prepared, truths are told, cars are crashed, lightning bolts flash. There is plenty of drama to be experienced here, as plowshares are beaten into swords. If there are giants in this maybe-no-longer-good earth, they are pissed and taking revenge. Watch out! A Thousand Acres is powerful stuff. No fertilizer needed. =============================EXTRA STUFFLinks to the author’s web site, FB page and Huff-Po blogAn Interview with Mary Camille Beckman, of Fiction Writers Review, in which Smiley talks about writingAn interview with Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive on politics in her writingRoger Ebert has some unkind things to say about the film that was made of A Thousand AcresA 2003 profile of Smiley from The Guardian
A sense of inevitable tragedy stalks the Iowa farming family author Jane Smiley portrays in A THOUSAND ACRES. It's the fruit of three generations — both the gift and the vengeance of the reconfigured land. Drainage, agrichemicals, factory methods and mechanization are only part of the story. The land has shaped society. It's a society that equates acquisition with success, and confuses good luck with moral virtue. Smiley intersperses other hints about this society throughout the book. The phrase 'family farm' conjured for me the image of the barn raising scene in the movie “Witness.” Isolation, not communitarianism prevails here: “The families who lived here had only the most tenuous links to one another. Each lived a distinct style, to divergent ends.” (p.147) Smiley buttresses this idea with the example of the Ericson farm with its inviting household of pets and congeniality. These very characteristics make it a doomed farm, and neighbors anticipate the day when the Ericsons will be forced to sell. Smiley creates other images as well: The importance of appearances; the insularity that casts anyone born outside the community in an unsympathetic light; the sense of affront prompted by mention of new farming practices. There's an oft-repeated phrase these farmers use to condense misfortune's inflictions: “That's farming.” The underlying sentiment, however, reflects the fine line between stoicism and callousness Layers and layers of rationalization are peeled away as Ginny Cook, a person who prides herself on her objectivity, narrates the story of her family. At the center is her father Larry Cook, the domineering patriarch, successful, rigid and respected by the community. Ginny seems accepting of even the coarsest of his behaviors, when she confides that Larry thinks his unmarried youngest daughter Carolyn is getting “old for a breeder.” (p.13) Early in the book she recalls as a child watching Larry with affection as he works the fields, seemingly unaffected by the recent death of his wife. Ginny's view of her father is immediately divergent from the reader's. As a child she sees him as a symbolic protector. As an adult she assumes he is merely difficult. The reader sees a remote demanding figure who nurtures his anger, and dictates the services his daughters must provide on an inflexible timetable. Ginny's transformation is incremental. Only later does it occur to her that she cannot imagine her father viewing his daughters with tenderness and affection in the way that she views her sleeping nieces. Ginny's story is an awakening from emotional paralysis. “It was easy, sitting there and looking at him [Larry], to see it his way. What did we deserve after all? There he stood, the living source of us all. I squirmed, remembering my ungrateful thoughts....Of course it was silly to talk about 'my point of view'. When my father asserted his own point of view, mine vanished. Not even I could remember it.” (p.176)Ginny is an honest but unreliable narrator. This is readily apparent to the reader. She links her sister Rose's apparent contentment with farming to an absence of ambition visible from early childhood. Yet, in practically the same sentence, she also recalls a youthful Rose who considered the possibility of a Kentucky horse farm in her future.The marriage choices of Ginny and Rose are puzzling. Ginny married Ty, a farmer with less land than Larry, but with appropriate farming ambitions. Ty is polite, hard-working, soft-spoken, predictable and easy for Ginny to read. More important, his farming lineage had won Larry's approval. Yet, as the story progresses, the reader sees how his passivity encourages Ginny's diffidence. He likes the illusion that Ginny always agrees with him. Ginny's younger sister Rose is outspoken, practical and tough, but she married Pete, a volatile musician with artistic aspirations before he decided to 'settle down.' Ginny is haunted by a history of multiple miscarriages. Rose is haunted by the future. She has had a radical mastectomy and since then her goals have assumed a new urgency. Ginny and Rose have always been close. It is a complex family bond that Ty finds incomprehensible. The story opens in 1979. After an absence of 13 years, Jess Clark returns from Vancouver where he fled after being drafted. Even more astonishing than his return is his father Harold's enthusiastic welcome. Harold throws a barbecue where he puts both Jess and his newly acquired top-of-the-line tractor on display. Jess's return is a catalyst. His physical resemblance to his brother Loren provokes an analogy in Ginny's mind. Jess looks like an alternative version of Loren, just as there might be alternative versions of life. It is a novel thought for someone as emotionally repressed as Ginny.At the barbecue Larry makes an uncharacteristic impulsive decision. He announces he plans to retire and turn the farm over to his three daughters. When Carolyn, a lawyer who lives in the city, advises caution, he explodes and cuts her out of the land transfer. Both Rose and Ty are pleased with the decision to transfer the land. Ty has harbored ambitions to expand the pig-raising operation, so this is a dream come true. Neither of them are alarmed by Larry's treatment of Carolyn, since she doesn't want to farm anyway. Ginny allows her sense of unease about this sudden change to be outweighed by Rose and Ty and assumes her usual agreeable posture. (view spoiler)[I loved the character of Rose. She never flinches in the face of cancer, and her blunt honesty is a refreshing contrast to Ginny's cautiousness. Yet, she is animated by a destructive rage. Her affair with Jess contributes to her husband Pete's suicide. Her disclosure to Ginny ignites a murderous impulse. Rose is both a powerful and frightening character. Ginny's deferral of the present is reflected when she muses: “...I felt the familiar sensation of storing up virtue for a later date.” (p.286) If virtue can be stored, however, so can anger. Discovering her own sense of self frees her to act, but the act is one of selfish violence. (hide spoiler)]
What do You think about A Thousand Acres (2003)?
After loving Some Luck, it seemed only natural to me to roll right into Jane Smiley's most famous novel. A Thousand Acres is a retelling of King Lear in the heart of Iowa farming country during the Carter administration, an era that Smiley depicts as being the last gasp for many independent family farms. I don't know the play that well--specifically, I have seen the season of Slings and Arrows where they put on King Lear--and I was surprised to discover that nearly everything that happens in it has its roots in the play itself. (Even the history of incest that drives the story of the novel apparently stems from one interpretation of the play.) The biggest departure isn't so much the setting (Shakespeare gets reinvented that way all the time), even; Smiley's big leap is in making the two older sisters the tragic heroines while Lear (here, farmer Larry Cook) serves as the villain.Of course, none of this would matter if the book came across as a clever exercise. However, Smiley establishes a level of grandeur in the inter-generational struggle to secure the land, from its origins as a swampy morass sold by a huckster to luckless immigrants to the largest and best-run farm in the county. Narrator Ginny Cook says early on that a farmer goes to church to pay his respects, not to give thanks. Smiley's genius is in selling that attitude as natural and earned, before slowly revealing it as poisonous and destructive.Part of how she accomplishes that is with a strong heroine at the center. Narrator Ginny Cook begins the story wanting to see the best in her family, and able to get excited over little things like an extended game of Monopoly with her family. As a Shakespearean tragedy, the story eventually involves death, maiming and betrayal; but what sells the heartbreak to me is Ginny's gradual disillusionment, until she can no longer ignore the truth about her family or herself.I find stories about inheritance and family compelling as a rule, and A Thousand Acres has a strong handle on that: on what you get from your ancestors, whether you like it or not, and how sometimes that can hang like a millstone around your neck. I definitely recommend this book.
—Daniel
When this book was chosen by our book club for this month's theme of "tragedy," I approached reading it with some trepidation. There are a number of things that I don't care for in literature, and one of them is the family drama which centers on the drama as drama for its own sake, rather than to say something more about the world. Part of my bias against this kind of writing comes from having cut my eyeteeth on science fiction, the literature of ideas which, at its best, is about today as much as it is about a future. I also spent three years in a creative writing program where, god bless them, my fellow students seemed to spend a lot of time writing autobiographical stories that didn't have much to say beyond it sucks to grow up in fill-in-the-blank. The book had won a Pulitzer, and if there's anything I learned in my MFA classes on literature, an award was often a signal that a book was not for the reader but written for the critics. A Thousand Acres screamed to me from its cover that it was that kind of book, that focused on the dissolution of the family as seen through a retelling of the King Lear story. I shuddered.But, really, I shouldn't have. Having previously read two books by Jane Smiley (the quite amusing MOO and the intelligent and thoughtful Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel), I should have given her the benefit of the doubt. Within the first fifty pages, I was surprised that Smiley had drawn me into her story, and while it was still fairly mundane (the family dog wasn't going to start talking on page 100, to my dismay), I found the voice of the narrator intriguing and wondered just how much of King Lear Smiley was going to be able to transpose to 1970s Iowa. Turns out, quite a bit, in a wondrously deft way that I would have termed a 'tour de force' if I used that phrase anymore.The narrator is the eldest of the three daughters, and instead of a king dividing up his kingdom, the family farm is to be divided among the daughters somewhat early by forming a corporation in which he gives control of the farm to the children, in a sudden move that delights the older daughters and their husbands and alarms the youngest, who no longer lives on the farm nor has much to do with it. Her concern about the alacrity of his decision infuriates the father, so much that he cuts her out of the paperwork process and thus the land itself. Pretty much every plot point in the Shakespearean play is touched upon in some manner, but never so roughly that the connections feel strained. If anything, Smiley's version is much, much more subtle in its understanding of the characters' motivations, giving both a sympathetic portrait of the older two sisters that is entirely missing in the play, as well as making the Lear figure less of a madman and more of a stubborn one, such that when his stubbornness leads him into the rain, his madness becomes if not sensible, at least reasonable. You don't necessarily take any one character's side in this fight, but none seems such a villain.What Smiley does that, I think, one-ups Shakespeare even more than making the female characters sympathetic is that she truly makes the tragedy about the land as about the people. In the background, and infusing everything the character's do to a point, is the thousand acres of the title. Perhaps it is because it is hard for us to imagine a kingdom as something one can own and pass to your children, for it's very easy to grasp the concept of these thousand acres, how much they mean to the family, and how tragic it is that this family cannot hold on to that land. In the past, I've been less than sympathetic to the concept of the family farm, but even my cold heart can't read what Smiley has described here and see it as anything but a tragedy.What this novel has over the modern literature that I feared it would be is not only a plot (people die here, not to mention being maimed and insulted and cruelly treated) but a larger meaning, and that big picture of this being more than just a personal tragedy, is what makes this worthwhile reading. Out of the group who read this for book club, I turned out to rate this book the highest, and that is to say, I recommend it strongly.
—Glen Engel-Cox
Jane's EndingsI guess there is nothing so frightening as families. As a child, as a young person, your family forms the air you breathe, the landscape you accept as the world. It can take a long time to discover there is something amiss in your family, because you think that is just the way things are everywhere. Smiley's A Thousand Acres embarks on the unlayering of such a discovery so gently, so beautifully, that it's hard to believe that she has brought you, safe in your armchair, face to face with such evil. But believe you do. And the danger is so slippery, so insidious, and you don't realize until suddenly you are no longer an adult with some level of say-so, but once again a child, scared out of her wits, who has seen a monster, who is trying to tell someone, but no one believes there's any danger. And the monster is here. Yes, this is a beautiful and frightening novel, of land and blood and the heritage of a rural family in a landscape of violent secrets. It is a story of the concessions we make, for love and survival and out of ignorance of any choice. It is a sad story, a story of America's heartland. But then you're half way through, and it's not over, and Smiley, in her inimitable way, having led us down this dark and dangerous path, nevertheless then manages to bring a new day, a new sense of triumph in the face of utter disaster. I'm kind of waiting to see how she does it...like watching a magician to see how the trick is done. And then, there it is, the turn toward something altogether else that opens a new avenue, a new vista. A comic wickedness that I would have bet the farm she couldn't get away with. But she does. I used to think, when reading some of Smiley's early novels, that she was a terrific writer who just did not know how to write an ending to her sprawling yarns. (Thinking here of The All -True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton and Good Faith.) And I admit, there was a moment in this novel when I thought, ok, downhill from here. But I'm changing my mind. I'm thinking of a bigger canvas here...big enough to make sense of her ability to pull back to some level of comic relief in the midst of heart-breaking catastrophe. To tell a story of cosmic benevolence thwarting one's lesser instincts in the midst of so much angst...well, how bold, how weird, how Smiley. How glad I am for American literature that she is so ours.
—Sara Warner
