A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

There must be something about Shakespeare and farms. A decade and a half before David Wroblewski set Hamlet in a Wisconsin dog-breeding farm in The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (reviewed here), Jane Smiley put the Iowa farmland spin on King Lear in A Thousand Acres, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Larry Cook, an Iowa farmer, plays the part of aging patriarch. His eldest daughters, Ginny (who narrates) and Rose, live on the farm with their husbands Ty and Pete, respectively. Ginny, unable to carry any of her own pregnancies to term, dotes on Rose's two little girls. The youngest of Cook's daughters, Caroline, has eschewed the farm for law school and then life in the big city (well, Des Moines).

The book's title comes from the patriarch's empire, a substantial piece of farmland cobbled together over several generations by the work and luck of Cook and his ancestors. The final piece, combining his father's 640 acres with the 370 of the neighboring Ericsons, was the crowning achievement on Larry's lifetime of accomplishment. Still successful but grown weary of inheritance taxes, Larry springs a surprise on everyone. He wants to transfer his land to a corporation owned equally by each daughter:

In spite of that inner clang, I tried to sound agreeable. "It's a good idea."
Rose said, "It's a great idea."
Caroline said, "I don't know."

And as quick as that, their fates are sealed. Caroline is written out of the deal, setting her on a collision course with her sisters. The farming sons-in-law embark on an ambitious expansion and equipment upgrade. As one might foresee, it does not take long for Larry to feel restless in his newly subordinate position. As his behavior becomes erratic and Ginny and Rose try to exert some restraint, he spirals completely out of control:

He leaned his face toward mine. "You don't have to drive me around any more, or cook the goddamned breakfast or clean the goddamned house." His voice modulated into a scream. "Or tell me about what I can do and what I can't do. You barren whore!"

If Larry Cook's descent into madness and subsequent flight to his youngest daughter is reminiscent of Lear's fate, it is utterly devoid of the sympathy one feels for the fallen monarch. Here it is the father, not the daughters, whose monstrosity is revealed as the story progresses. The daughters are deeply flawed to be sure, but whatever missteps they take pale in comparison to, and may derive from, their father's crimes.

The novel deals frankly with a host of difficult or taboo subjects: miscarriages, cancer, suicide, insanity, incest, rape, adultery, and more. But except for Ginny's failed pregnancies, which are delicately shown to shape much of her worldview, these provocative and sensitive subjects are handled with neither care nor, apparently, much interest. The most shocking revelations are tossed out in a few matter-of-fact sentences with the same level tone used to describe mundane details about a tractor or dress fabric. Perhaps this is intentional, a symptom of Ginny's restricted emotional range. But the effect of touching the untouchable is severely undermined where the contact is treated so casually.

All in all an interesting effort that mustered ambitions it could not meet. Like Toni Morrison's Beloved and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, this is a book I read in high school and disliked, unable to summon much perspective beyond ignorant teenage malehood. Unlike those titles, which I've since discovered to be transcendentally brilliant, Smiley's effort still leaves me ambivalent. This time I feel a bit more confident that the flaws rest in the work more than the reader.