About this title: Larry Cook isn't getting any younger, and he decides to divide his 1000 acres of prime Iowa farmland between his three very different daughters: Ginny, Rose, and Caroline. But Caroline, who tends to speak her mind, lacks the proper enthusiasm for the deal, and Larry impulsively disinherits her. Vividly set in Iowa farm country, Jane Smiley's saga is a feminist statement, an exploration of family dysfunctionality, and a vivid echo of Shakespeare's KING LEAR.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
"The book is a modern and American re-telling of King Lear and it is a delight to read--that is, for a story about a family that completely falls apart. What's so great about the book and the re-telling of Shakespeare is that it's such a fresh perspective: It's female, American, and modern. For one, it's not easy to lay fault on any one person for the tragedy that unravels (Shakespeare easily blames the two eldest daughters in KL). If anyone is to blame, it's the abusive father. (And it's a modern type of abuse--a bit disturbing). The ambiguity surrounding the tragedy does not allow for the catharsis that classic tragedies provided the audience. The "moral lessons" are not clear-cut and almost irrelevant to this telling. KL is about family loyalty, avoiding greed, respecting your father, and avoiding Hubris on Lear's part. A Thousand Acres is about the telling of a tragedy with as much beautiful detail and self-reflection (a lot of it false or misguided) as possible. There are no heroes, no pure victims (except maybe a few of the men whose characters are not fully developed) and destruction all around. The text is so rich and the narration so complex that you can just sit back and enjoy this unraveling in a way that only a modern perspective allows."
"I really enjoyed this book. The writing style is very natural, clear, and quick moving. It reminds me a little bit of Thomas Hardy's novels in that the landscape is integral to the story, to the point of almost becoming a character. In this case, the landscape is a farm in rural Iowa. The land and the practice of farming have formed the characters, their personalities and views. The farm is both sustenance to its inhabitants and the cause of a great deal of anguish.
THe narrator of the story is a woman in her thirties who has grown up on the farm and has never questioned the trajectory of her life. The transfer of the farm from this woman's father to the narrator and her sisters serves as the catalyst for laying bare all of the family's hurts, resentments and unfulfilled desires. What I love about this book is that there are many subtle interplays woven throughout. Nothing is cut and dried, and noone agrees as to who are the heroes and the villains. Again it reminds me of Hardy in that the "villain", or the cause of the troubles,appears to be greater than the human characters. It incorporates the landscape and the culture of farming but is greater than that, too. It calls into question what we perceive to be truth, and how we perceive other people."
"This book was truly mesmerizing to me. I can't distinctly put my finger on what make this book entirely un-put-down-able. This story is set on a family farm in Iowa from a period between (circa) 1977 to 1980, a time and place as anachronistic to me as Japan in the 1830's; however, through Smiley's writing style I was there, I could see the beauty of the farms, smell their smells, and feel what it was like to kick dried mud off a tractor tire. Smiley is likely very faithful to farming, she used a lot of references to the art, science, and machinery of farming, but I wouldn't know at all, but I didn't get lost in those details either.
The characters are probably what made this book the most remarkable for me. The two oldest sisters (Ginny and Rose) had a relationship that is seemingly similar to that of me and my sister (without the shared sexual partners thing) with one having a dominant and angry/aggressive demeanor and the other (that would be me) being more likely to avoid confrontation at all costs and behave in a way that she knows will allow her to be accepted by her peers.
However, the characters are where she had her minor set-backs for me as well. 1) The character of Caroline (the youngest sister) was kind of a non-event for me, I never could fully understand where she was coming from, which perhaps you're not supposed to because the protagonist (Ginny) doesn't understand her sister either--a definite possibility in the first-person narration, we're subject to the knowledge and perspective of the narrator; and 2) The character of Ty (Ginny's husband). I absolutely loved Ty, I could see myself (having a personality on the Ginny end of the continuum) being comfortable with Ty, following his lead and trusting him to run the farm successfully. I didn't understand Ginny's restlessness and why she left for St. Paul; I think this was critical, and Smiley wrote it as if Ginny made decisions in regard to her relationship with Ty without ever knowing why she was making the decisions.
The plot of the story was immensely complex, and (based on the advice Smiley gives in her book 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel) I kept thinking to myself, "This climax is coming way too early," because what I thought was the climax was only rising action. Smiley had so much complexity in the interpersonal relationships that unfolded (without becoming confusing or tedious) that you just were completely immersed in the goings-on of this family. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised--she won a Pulitzer prize for this, and you don't get those from writing a human/vampire/werewolf love triangle story, it's got to be unique and teaching and entertaining and novel and wonderful (all of which this book is).
All in all, Smiley has a great lyrical writing style and a complex storyline that is totally worth the 371 pages that you'll read. She got knocked down to an A (rather than A+) because of the minor character flaws I felt.
On a side note, Smiley was living in Iowa at the time that she wrote this, I know (from reading her nonfiction work) that she was later divorced and now lives in San Francisco (remarried, I believe), and I wonder if any of that was going on around the time she was writing this and/or if that had an effect on the shape this story took."
"I bought this book last August, and only now I got to read it. It was sertainly worth waiting for... Or, well, waht I mean is that it is totally great! "A great American tragedy about the failure of a family's land and the failure of its love", Independent says on the cover of my copy of the book. That's it in a nutshell. Larry Cook owns a farm of a thousand acres, and he desides to retire and hand the farm over to his three daughters and their husbands... And then everything starts going wrong. EVERYTHING starts going REALLY wrong.
I do see why the book has won the Pulizer Prize. It really captures me. Really gets to me. I lived through the awful events with Ginny, the oldest daughter and the "I" in the book. I kind of felt thet it was my life that was going into peaces. Tragedy after tragedy...
This book definitely confirms that life is hard. Life isn't dancing on roses. What seams like a peaceful life could be a life full of hidden secrets. And when they little by little start being rewealed... hell brakes loose. And there's no happy ending. Jane Smiley just isn't for happy endings."
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