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A Thousand Acres
A Novel
Written by Jane Smiley
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Pages: 384 | ISBN: 978-0-307-78771-2
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Synopsis
A successful Iowa farmer decides to divide his farm between his three daughters. When the youngest objects, she is cut out of his will. This sets off a chain of events that brings dark truths to light and explodes long-suppressed emotions. An ambitious reimagining of Shakespeare’s King Lear cast upon a typical American community in the late twentieth century, A Thousand Acres takes on themes of truth, justice, love, and pride, and reveals the beautiful yet treacherous topography of humanity.Excerpt
At sixty miles per hour, you could pass our farm in a minute, on County Road 686, which ran due north into the T intersection at Cabot Street Road. Cabot Street Road was really just another country blacktop, except that five miles west it ran into and out of the town of Cabot. On the western edge of Cabot, it became Zebulon County Scenic Highway, and ran for three miles along the curve of the Zebulon River, before the river turned south and the Scenic continued west into Pike. The T intersection of CR 686 perched on a little rise, a rise nearly as imperceptible as the bump in the center of an inexpensive plate.From that bump, the earth was unquestionably flat, the sky unquestionably domed, and it seemed to me when I was a child in school, learning about Columbus, that in spite of what my teacher said, ancient cultures might have been onto something. No globe or map fully convinced me that Zebulon County was not the center of the universe. Certainly, Zebulon County, where the earth was flat, was one spot where a sphere (a seed, a rubber ball, a ballbearing) must come to perfect rest and once at rest must send a taproot downward into the ten-foot-thick topsoil.
Because the intersection was on this tiny rise, you could see our buildings, a mile distant, at the southern edge of the farm. A mile to the east, you could see three silos that marked the northeastern corner, and if you raked your gaze from the silos to the house and barn, then back again, you would take in the immensity of the piece of land my father owned, six hundred forty acres, a whole section, paid for, no encumbrances, as flat and fertile, black, friable, and exposed as any piece of land on the face of the earth.
If you looked west from the intersection, you saw no sign of anything remotely scenic in the distance. That was because the Zebulon River had cut down through topsoil and limestone, and made its pretty course a valley below the level of the surrounding farmlands. Nor, except at night, did you see any sign of Cabot. You saw only this, two sets of farm buildings surrounded by fields. In the nearer set lived the Ericsons, who had daughters the ages of my sister Rose and myself, and in the farther set lived the Clarks, whose sons, Loren and Jess, were in grammar school when we were in junior high. Harold Clark was my father's best friend. He had five hundred acres and no mortgage. The Ericsons had three hundred seventy acres and a mortgage.
Acreage and financing were facts as basic as the name and gender in Zebulon County. Harold Clark and my father used to argue at our kitchen table about who should get the Ericson land when they finally lost their mortgage. I was aware of this whenever I played with Ruthie Ericson, whenever my mother, my sister Rose, and I went over to help can garden produce, whenever Mrs. Ericson brought over some pies or doughnuts, whenever my father loaned Mr. Ericson a tool, whenever we ate Sunday dinner in the Ericson's kitchen. I recognized the justice of Harold Clark's opinion that the Ericson' land was on his side of the road, but even so, I thought it should be us. For one thing, Dinah Ericson's bedroom had a window seat in the closet that I coveted. For another, I thought it appropriate and desirable that the great circle of the flat earth spreading out from the T intersection of County Road 686 and Cabot Street be ours. A thousand acres. It was that simple.
It was 1951 and I was eight when I saw the farm and the future in this way. That was the year my father bought his first car, a Buick sedan with prickly gray velvet seats, so rounded and slick that it was easy to slide off the backseat into the footwell when we went over a stiff bump or around a sharp corner. That was also the year my sister Caroline was born, which was undoubtedly the reason my father bought the car. The Ericson Children and the Clark children continued to ride in the back of the farm pickup, but the Cook children kicked their toes against a front seat and stared out the back windows, nicely protected from the dust. The car was the exact measure of six hundred forty acres compared to three hundred or five hundred.
In spite of the price of gasoline, we took a lot of rides that year, something farmers rarely do, and my father never again did after Caroline was born. For me, it was a pleasure like a secret hoard of coins--Rose, whom I adored, sitting against me in the hot musty velvet luxury of the car's interior, the click of the gravel on its undercarriage, the sensation of the car swimming in the rutted road, the farms passing every minute, reduced from vastness to insignificance by our speed; the unaccustomed sense of leisure; most important, though, the reassuring note of my father's and mother's voices commenting on what they saw--he on the progress of the yearly work and the condition of the animals in the pastures, she on the look and size of the house and garden, the colors of the buildings. Their tones of voice were unhurried and self-confident, complacent with the knowledge that the work at our place was farther along, the buildings at our place more imposing and better cared for. When I think of them now, I think how they had probably seen nearly as little of the world as I had by that time. But when I listened to their duet then, I nestled into the certainty of the way, through the repeated comparisons, our farm and our lives seemed secure and good.
Excerpted from A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley. Copyright © 1992 by Jane Smiley. Excerpted by permission of Anchor, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
About Jane Smiley
Photo © Michael Lionstar
Jane Smiley is represented by Random House Speakers Bureau (www.rhspeakers.com)
Author Q&A
A Conversation with Jane Smiley
Ron Fletcher interviewed Jane Smiley and wrote the reader's guides for two previous Smiley novels, The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton and Horse Heaven. He teaches English at Boston Col-lege High School in Massachusetts. His reviews and interviews have appeared in The Boston Phoenix as well as The Christian Science Monitor. Daunted and haunted, Ron continues to work on his first novel.
Q: More than a decade has passed since the publication of A Thousand Acres; how do you feel about the novel today?
A: A few summers ago, I wrote a piece on the novel for The Washington Post in which I said that I didn't like it and I wouldn't write it again. I argued that philosophically A Thousand Acres, like King Lear, asks what is love, and then proposes something of the same answer: love is an exchange. Lear says to his daughters I gave you everything, and in return he expects fealty, submission, and honor. When Lear says I gave you everything he means not only his kingdom but everything, and that's what he wants in return.The action of the play proves that the idea of love as an exchange amounts to nothing. By the end of Lear no one loves anybody: everyone's either dead or grieving or resigned to life in a completely impersonal and terrifying world.
I ended up repeating this quid pro quo version of love in A Thousand Acres, but now I see the play and thus my novel quite differently. My attitudes about life and the world and love were transformed after I wrote King Lear--bite my tongue, I mean after I wrote A Thousand Acres.
Q: What now is your understanding of love vis-a-vis these works?
A: The sort of love Shakespeare depicts in The Winter's Tale makes more sense to me now than the one he offers in Lear. Although Shakespeare presents a similar family situation in this later play, he proposes a much different definition of love. The Winter's Tale suggests that love is a gift from outside of the world and that the hallmark of love is forgiveness. This sort of love makes salvation of the family possible, whereas its opposite in Lear tears everyone apart. Several years separate these plays, yet I think that they speak to one another about what love is and reveal the extent to which Shakespeare's mind changed.
Q: What changed your mind about King Lear?
A: Well, time and experience in general as well as a symposium of the World Shakespeare Congress that I attended in Los Angeles a few years ago. During a discussion of A Thousand Acres, one panelist pointed out that when Shakespeare was writing King Lear his father seemed to be a victim of an Alzheimer's-like disease, some kind of senile dementia. Prior to hearing this news I had always seen Shakespeare as identifying with Lear in the sense that he was a man and he wanted the unquestioned fealty of the women around him. I always thought the play was about how Lear failed to enter into an actual relationship with his daughters from beginning to end.The relationships at the beginning of the play seemed as false as those at the end, if only in a slightly different way.
Q:Your sympathies shifted?
A: They did. I now think that the idea of Shakespeare identifying with his daughters is more psychologically true than that of his identifying with Lear. When you're in a situation when a family member has a mental illness or a mental decline you feel that there is no possible normal role that you can have in relationship to that person: if you live your life in a normal way, then you feel like you're not fulfilling the needs of that person, which are very great, and yet it's impossible to live your life as a saint.
So, I suddenly saw Shakespeare as torn in his personal life between being like Goneril and Regan, who seem like more or less normal women given their anger and resentment, and Cordelia, who seems like a saint but is not very believable.
Once I had that change of heart about where the essence of Shakespeare's imagination was in the play, then I began to see King Lear differently and as a result to see A Thousand Acres differently.
Q: Yet the novel does convey and question convictions you held when writing it, no?
A: That's true. No writer can write without a sense of conviction; it's absolutely necessary. Without conviction you can't go forward or put anything down.As soon as you put something down with that fabulous sense of conviction, however, things change, truths shift. So, you put the next thing down with conviction.
Q: What convictions lie at the heart of A Thousand Acres?
A: Well, A Thousand Acres has always been an abstraction for me because it wasn't based on any actual experiences in my life: I didn't come from a farm; I didn't suffer abuse; I didn't grow up with just my father. The novel was entirely constructed around King Lear, so it's entirely abstract in terms of its relationship to my consciousness. Even so, it drew on feelings that I had about patriarchy, environmental issues, and western history since Shakespeare's time. I had very strong and systematic views about all these things, and the novel sort of drew on the emotional content of those views. And a relatively aggressive feminism was at the heart of those views.
Q: Some see A Thousand Acres as the work of a polemicist, while others find it an accomplished fiction that examines but remains unobscured by competing ideologies.
A: I like to think that any ideology in the novel is hidden well. For example, Ginny gets to be an unsophisticated and uneducated feminist who appears to come to her conclusions on her own, but that's not me. I came to her conclusions with a certain theoretical background, and then I just imagined another way for Ginny to approach such issues. There's a necessary sleight of hand there.
Q: How do you feel about your work being appropriated to push a particular politics?
A: I learned early on that you have no control about how the literary system you constructed will appear to others. I recall when The Greenlanders was endorsed by an extremely conservative organization that was fooled by the book's archaic tone into not seeing its radical politics.
The other thing is that all literary systems have a consciousness and a subconsciousness.You don't know the total content of what you've constructed, because there's this underground area created by the cultural moment in which it was authored as well as that in which it is read. President Bush could read Moo today and pick up on not only what I put in there, but things formed by the culture--things over which I had no control. That he might give the novel a reading I would not be able to share makes his reading no less valid.
Q: Doubtless some readers encounter A Thousand Acres before King Lear, allowing your work to influence or at least color Shakespeare's. Rather heady stuff.
A: Absolutely. Those girls who read A Thousand Acres in high school then go on to read King Lear will never read Shakespeare the way they would have read it had they read it cold. And I think that's a good thing. It's also inevitable: no person's literary history occurs in the same order.
Q: When considering your fiction do you think in terms of a body of work or individual novels?
A: When I go to a shelf of Dickens' books or Shakespeare's plays I see them all at once; they exist simultaneously. In their lives, though, they didn't exist that way at all: they evolved out of one another. One of the things we don't pay enough attention to is the idea that each book that a writer writes evolves both from the life that he has lived and also the previous books he has written. Each book teaches something, provokes, and makes him change his mind about something. Then that mind goes on to write the next book, which inevitably has a different take on things. So, I think we should think of books not in terms of comparing and contrasting one with another, but instead ask how did this book evolve out of that one. What did Dickens learn in The Pickwick Papers that he put to work in Oliver Twist?
Q: How does this view inform your perspective on A Thousand Acres?
A: Because I didn't die at the end of A Thousand Acres, I can't help going on and thinking of things differently. There's nothing I can do about it. So, A Thousand Acres is not my final word on any issue; it's just a place that I passed through at that point in my life.
After I passed through that place, I had another child, I moved to California, my marriage broke up, and my children grew up. I went on to live in a place and environment where issues presented themselves differently, thus I wrote with conviction about the next thing.
Q: Do you regard all of your novels as having receded for good?
A: No. There is an exception. I feel that I could come back to Horse Heaven in ten years and make it better, but A Thousand Acres and the others are artifacts of their time and my life. It's much more interesting to go on and write new things than to fiddle around with the artifacts. So, I don't have much attachment to any of the books that I've written simply because they aren't current and they don't represent what I'm thinking. Each is a husk or a shell--some indica-tion of where I've been.
Q: What has hindsight revealed about the significance of winning the Pulitzer Prize with A Thousand Acres?
A: It was and remains very significant; it meant that I was successful. I got a lot of money and promptly changed my life: I moved to California, bought horses, and began a different way of living. But it didn't have any effect on my sense of self as an artist.
Q: What do you think of the film of your novel?
A: I have no thoughts about it at all. I was happy to cash the check--that's about my only thought.
Q: You once said that the movie made you glad you were a novelist.
A:Yeah, that was my other thought.
Q: A Thousand Acres represented the tragedy in your plan to work in four distinct genres. The Greenlanders, an epic, preceded it. Later came the comedy Moo followed by the romance The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton. How did your last novel, Horse Heaven, relate to this cycle?
A: I have a theory about literary form: each time you're working in a single genre you're niggled by its limitations and the opportunities of another. For instance, you can't tragically kill off the main character of your comedy. When I got to Horse Heaven, I wanted to do everything--epic, tragedy, comedy, romance, realism, and fantasy. I wanted the whole cake rather than just one piece.
Q: What's the next cake looking like?
A: Well, the next cake is much simpler. It looks like a tale about a mysterious stranger. It will be a straight-forward realist novel more than anything else.
Q:Your subject?
A: The '80s and Reaganomics. One of the things that fascinates me about that period is how government actions so rapidly caused chaos. Congress said let's fix the Savings and Loans disaster this way, and individuals all over the country promptly engaged in corrupt behavior and destroyed an entire industry and endangered the savings of millions of people.
Q: What occurs at the intersection--or collision--of the individual and the collective, the social and the solitary is at least one prominent motif of your fiction, no?
A: I've always been interested in the ways that history manifests itself through individual actions and how large-scale events play themselves out in personal, private lives. What hap-pened under Reagan in the '80s is another opportunity for me to examine how an individual and his sense of his own autonomy are deeply embedded in the fabric of national life.
Q: What challenges have you faced in moving from Regan to Reagan?
A: Each novel is a kind of test.When I set out to write A Thousand Acres, I had King Lear in front of me and I followed it. I knew where I was going. If I strayed from the path, I would backtrack to return to it.
With my present novel, I have no idea, no master plan, which is something I would never have been able to tol-erate ten years ago. Now, I just say let's do this and let's try that. And I write with a faith that it will all work out in the end. And I'm sure that my faith, like all true faiths, will be totally satisfied.
Praise
“Brilliant. . . . Absorbing. . . . A thrilling work of art.” —Chicago Sun-Times“A family portrait that is also a near-epic investigation into the broad landscape, the thousand dark acres of the human heart. . . . The book has all the stark brutality of a Shakespearean tragedy.” —The Washington Post Book World
“Powerful and poignant.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Superb. . . . There seems to be nothing Smiley can’t write about fabulously well.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“It has been a long time since a novel so surprised me with its power to haunt. . . . A Thousand Acres [has] the prismatic quality of the greatest art.” —Chicago Tribune
“Absorbing. . . . Exhilarating. . . . An engrossing piece of fiction.” —Time
“A full, commanding novel. . . . A story bound and tethered to a lonely road in the Midwest, but drawn from a universal source. . . . Profoundly American.” —The Boston Globe
Awards
WINNER 1991 National Book Critics Circle AwardsWINNER 1992 Pulitzer Prize
About the Book
PULITZER PRIZE WINNERNational Book Critics Circle Award Winner
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
“Brilliant. . . . absorbing. . . . A thrilling work of art.” —Chicago Sun-Times
The introduction, discussion questions, suggested reading list, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group’s reading of A Thousand Acres, the extraordinary novel that established Jane Smiley as one of America’s greatest writers.
About the Guide
A successful Iowa farmer decides to divide his farm between his three daughters. When the youngest objects, she is cut out of his will. This sets off a chain of events that brings dark truths to light and explodes long-suppressed emotions. An ambitious reimagining of Shakespeare’s King Lear cast in a typical American community in the late twentieth century, A Thousand Acres takes on themes of truth, justice, love, and pride, and reveals the beautiful yet treacherous topography of humanity.About the Author
Jane Smiley is the author of more than ten works of fiction, including Good Faith, Horse Heaven, Moo, and The Greenlanders. In 2001 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in northern California.Discussion Guides
1. How does the symbiotic relationship between person and place addressed in Ms. Smiley’s choice of epigraph play itself out in the novel? How does setting shape character and vice versa? Which seems to have the upper hand? How is Zebulon County itself a major character in A Thousand Acres?
2. What are the strengths and weaknesses of Ginny’s narration? Is she able to maintain clarity and candor throughout her chronicling of events? What gets in the way? Is she as forthcoming in portraying herself as she is in discussing others? Why or why not? How would the novel differ if told from the perspective of Rose, Caroline, Jess, or Larry?
3. At the outset of the novel, Ginny confesses that retrospection has not revealed too much about the drama that unfolded when her father decided to hand over the farm to Rose and her and leave out Caroline: “I’ve thought over every moment of that party time and time again, sifting for pointers, signals, ways of knowing how to do things differently from the way they got done. There were no clues” [p. 13]. To what extent does the story that she then tells undermine this claim? What remains a mystery despite her scrutiny?
4. What are the most tragic elements of A Thousand Acres? Which of these elements are rooted in the exercise of an individual’s will, and which seem attributable to something beyond the scope of human volition? Where does the novel ultimately situate itself in the enduring fate v. free will debate?
5. What do you see as Smiley’s debt to Shakespeare’s King Lear? Where do the two works part ways? What provides A Thousand Acres with its autonomy despite its borrowed plot and characters?
6. Which of the issues explored in A Thousand Acres are unique to rural life in America? Which resonate regardless of geography? What does the novel reveal about variations and consistencies in the so-called American character?
7. What are a few of the guises in which passion appears in A Thousand Acres? What seems to lie at the root of each guise? Which do the most damage? Why do some characters yield to a desire for authority, acreage, etc., while others resist such temptations? Is there greater freedom in following passion or in checking it? What does the novel teach us about the nature of passion, restraint, and indulgence?
8. The interior lives of Caroline as well as Larry remain relatively unexamined compared to those of Rose and Ginny, their spouses, and Jess. What is the dramatic and thematic significance of keeping these characters in the shadows?
9. Contemplating her father’s momentous decision, Ginny marvels at its apparent rashness. “He decided to change his whole life on Wednesday!” she exclaims. “Objectively, this is an absurdity” [p. 34]. Her remark points to the struggle against the whims of chance that appears throughout A Thousand Acres. How does the deliberate adherence to daily routine help the characters to weather the vicissitudes of the natural world and the inconsistency of human nature? What kind of solace and safety, if any, do seasonal chores and rituals provide?
10. Discuss the myriad ways that motherhood—and fatherhood—are weighed in the novel. How does Ginny’s ineluctable desire to give birth shape her view of her present and past? What meaning does she derive from the many surrogate-maternal roles she plays? In what ways is her mother’s long absence a constant presence?
11. “Our bond had a peculiar fertility that I was wise enough to appreciate, and also, perhaps, wise enough to appreciate in silence,” Ginny says. “Rose wouldn’t have stood for any sentimentality” [p. 62]. Reticence seems the norm among these characters, yet they express themselves in other ways. What nonverbal forms of communication do they use? What are the reach and limits of each? What are the perils and possibilities?
12. Is there a particular political view or ideology at work in A Thousand Acres? If so, what is it? Does viewing the novel through the lens of feminism, for example, limit or enlarge it? What do you see as the novelist’s responsibility vis-a-vis politics? Does this work fall closer to agenda or inquiry?
13. “The first novel I ever knew was my family,” writes Ms. Smiley in the afterword to Family: American Writers Remember Their Own (David McKay Co., 1997). “We had every necessary element, from the wealth of incident both domestic and historical, to the large cast of characters. We had geographical sweep and the requisite, for an American novel, adventure in the West.” How can A Thousand Acres be interpreted as a meditation on family? How does the novel shed light on the dark corners of family life? How are the Cooks both anomalous to and representative of the average American family? What explains their tragic dissolution? What could have prevented it?
14. What are the advantages and disadvantages of a story that is told almost entirely in the past tense? How does this affect your interpretation of the novel?
15. Ginny is stilled by the disturbing thought that her own “endurance might be a pleasant fiction allowed [her] by others who’ve really faced facts” [p. 90]. Is it? Do you construe her story, i.e., the novel, as flight from a difficult reality or a means of confronting it? Why?
16. During a game of Monopoly, Jess describes Harold as someone who is “cannier and smarter than he lets on,” then suggests that real freedom exists in “the slippage between what he looks like and what he is” [p. 109]. How does the relationship between appearance and reality drive the novel’s action in terms of the meaning and direction of its characters’ lives? What kind of importance does Jane Smiley assign to this relationship?
17. In what reads like a muted epiphany, Ginny considers the constant weight and exhaustion she felt in the months after her mother’s death and then realizes that one reaches a point where “relief is good enough” [p. 198]. Is this remark an expression of resignation or true acceptance?
18. In a candid conversation with Rose, Ginny voices her inability to understand her father’s abuse despite Rose’s insistence that the matter is a simple case of “I want, I take, I do.” Ginny says, “I can’t believe it’s that simple,” to which Rose responds: “If you probe and probe and try to understand, it just holds you back” [p. 212]. What does this exchange reveal about the limitations of reason? About the possibility or impossibility of true catharsis? What options exist when the rational is exhausted?
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