A Thousand Acres

This is not a part of The Great American Read's checklist but I think it should be. Jane Smiley won a Pulitzer Prize for this in 1992 for fiction by an American author preferably dealing with American life. It's not a happy story, nor is this the first time I've read it. I told another parent at a school event that this was one of my favorite books and she said she couldn't believe anyone would read it more than once. Funny enough, the first time I read it I was so rocked by the main "reveal" that chapters later when an act of violence was initiated by one of the main characters against the other, I completely missed it. It's also possible that I was sleep-deprived, but in any case, I was happy to catch it the second time around. 

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

You may or may not already know that this novel is pretty closely based upon Shakespeare's tragedy, King Lear, but you definitely don't need to have read it to appreciate this book. Smiley's work tends to focus around farms and families, and the dynamics of both elements are expertly examined here. In more of a re-imagining than an adaptation, Smiley's tale somewhat defies Shakespeare's--it's still the story of a powerful man divvying up his land, it's still a tragedy, but this book takes its time in explaining why its characters do what they do. If the takeaway from King Lear is SPOILED CHILDREN BECOME GREEDY ADULTS, the main message from this book is perhaps, POWERFUL MEN ARE OFTEN ALLOWED TO BE AS TERRIBLE AS THEY LIKE (and yes, in this case it's very).

Told from eldest daughter Ginny's perspective, the story focuses on the decline of her family after patriarch Larry Cook bequeaths his beloved thousand acres of prime Iowa farmland to Ginny and her two sisters, Rose and Caroline. Worth mentioning is the fact that Mother Cook has been gone for some time, having died when Caroline was just a child, and that Ginny and Rose share responsibility in caring for Larry in addition to their own families. Unfortunately, the big acreage giveaway doesn't go exactly as Larry intends--his fierce pride is wounded when Caroline hesitates to accept her share. With the entire town standing by, Larry writes his youngest daughter off entirely; her acres go to Ginny and Rose, relationships become strained as a result, and on and on it goes. Larry becomes sullen and combative, infighting breaks out among the sisters and their husbands, and disturbing memories are resurrected, suggesting that Larry Cook wasn't the husband and father everyone thought he was (or maybe he was but everyone just got used to looking the other way). 

The experience of reading this novel was a little different this time around because I'm so much older now, and my patience as a reader has been lengthened and inspired by my experience as a writer. I love the bits where nothing is happening but descriptions of the land or the explanations of farm procedures that some might

find monotonous. My father wasn't a farmer but my mother's people were, and we lived on a farm for the first ten years of my life. Trust me, the upkeep of paint on farm buildings, the length of the grass, and the condition of the animals and their enclosures were no small details when it came to a farmer's (or farm wife or daughter's) responsibilities. After we moved to town I picked rock, rogued and detassled corn, and rode the bean bar just like every child of hard-ass parents in Olivia, Minnesota did. Even now, years later, it resonates. 


So much of the telling of this story is wrapped in the language of the work being done, that even something as serious as a death in the family (through our eyes as readers as well as Ginny's) can't be separated from the chores that surrounded it and continued after its acknowledgement: 

"It must have been about six. Ty had eaten his breakfast and headed for the hog pens. I had been upstairs making the beds, so I didn't see the sheriff's car go by, but when I went outside with the blankets to hang them on the line for the day, I saw Rose stumbling up the road. That was the oddest thing, how she didn't seem to know where she was going. I was so struck by the strangeness of it that I didn't go out to meet her, but let her come. . . 

She'd been making muffins. The milk and eggs and butter were in the bowl of the mixer. The flour was half measured in the sifter. A green apple and a measuring cup lay on the floor where she'd dropped them or knocked them. I picked them up and finished making the muffins."

It's a story about work and secrets and grudges. Very German, yet very womanist, as our alignment is always with Ginny; Ginny's perceptions, Ginny's reactions, Ginny's redemption. If you enjoy Shakespearean tragedies or heavy family dramas with descriptive language and reflection, you will likely enjoy this novel. At 399 pages it is a bit of an investment, but if you put the time in and finish you'll be in perfect shape to tackle another series of Smiley family struggles in The Last Hundred Years Trilogy: Some Luck, Early Warning, and Golden Age.  

A Thousand Acres and 2 Angelinas.

A Thousand Acres

“When the aging patriarch of a rich, thriving farm in Iowa decides to retire, he offers his land to his three daughters. For Ginny and Rose, who live on the farm with their husbands, the gift makes sense---a reward for years of hard work, a challenge to make the farm even more successful. But the youngest, Caroline, a Des Moines lawyer, flatly rejects the idea, and in anger her father cuts her out--setting off an explosive series of events that will leave none of them unchanged.“

I really hadn’t plan on liking this; I think I saw the film when it first came out and don’t really remember anything about it other than the farm stuff. But sometimes ten years can feel like a million; I’m older now and stories like these carry a lot more weight (I grew up on the farm my mother’s parents had though my dad was not an official “farmer.”). And I really loved reading this. It was very well done and always interesting but also very much like something unpleasant you can’t look away from (like I don’t know, Jersey Shore or something but worse because there is no joy at all in this story, like, none).

Like I said, my parents weren’t farmers, but they lived on a farm and did a hell of a lot of farm work there; it's part of my earliest memories. Once a rat found its way into the horse’s feed box and my dad killed it by shooting it with his shotgun; after it was dead he yanked it out of the box and carried it off into the field by its tail using a pliers.

Anyway: some passages:

“My mother died before I knew her, before I liked her, before I was old enough for her to be herself with me . . . I have noticed that a mother left eternally young through death comes to seem as remote as your own young self. It’s easy to judge her misapprehensions and mistakes as it is to judge your own, and to fall into a habit of disrespect, as if all her feelings must have been as shallow and jejune as you think yours used to be.”

“I looked him square in the eye. It was my choice, to keep him waiting or to fail to give him his eggs. His gaze was flat, brassily reflective. Not only wasn’t he going to help me decide, my decision was a test. I could push past him, give him toast and cereal and bacon, a breakfast without a center of gravity, or I could run home and get the eggs. My choice would show him something about me, either that I was selfish and inconsiderate (no eggs) or that I was incompetent (a flurry of activity where there should be organized procedure). I did it. I smiled foolishly, said I would be right back, and ran out the door and back down the road.”

“ . . . I experienced, for the first conscious time, the peaceful self-regard of early grief, when the fact that you are still alive and functioning is so strangely similar to your previous life that you think you are okay. It is in that state of mind that people answer when you see them at funerals, and ask how they are doing. They say, “I’m fine. I’m okay, really,” and they really mean, I’m not unrecognizable to myself.”

Wow. And accurate.

Two Angies:



Salt, 2010, directed by Philip Noyce.Starring: Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber.

A CIA agent goes on the run after a defector accuses her of being a Russian spy.” (IMDB).

Tricky, tricky. This was fun. Mostly it was fun because of the chases over ledges, buses, and trucks, but I just find Angie kind of fun to watch in general. And I was completely caught off guard by the twists, well, probably only the first ten. After that? Silly, but still fun if you can relax and just be entertained.










The Tourist, 2010, 

directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
starring: Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, Steven Berkoff.

Revolves around Frank, an American tourist visiting Italy to mend a broken heart. Elise is an extraordinary woman who deliberately crosses his path.” (IMDB).

There are people out there, many of them friends of mine, who would have seen *everything* coming and probably would say this was overly predictable. I am luckily someone who is surprised pretty easily, and this was no exception. I thought the trickery was good and I was absolutely clueless until the very last scene, although I said (very distantly) to myself, “it would be pretty cool if . . .” and then, well it happened. I had a good time.

And WTF is with Steven Berkoff? He’s gotta be at least 120 by now and looking every bit as much. Yikes. I could honestly only tell it was Victor Maitland from the voice; the rest of his appearance was almost unrecognizable. But, you know, way to keep giving it your all, I guess.