Pulitzer Project: A Thousand Acres

Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1992. The good news is Smiley can write. You get sucked into the book. The writing flows. My usual goal is to do at least 50 pages a night. With A Thousand Acres I'd be reading along, not paying any attention to the time, glance at a page number and realize I'd slid past 50 pages and was nearing 100+. Then I'd look at the clock and realize how late it was getting. 

So what's the bad news, you ask? Well, for a start if you do any Googling for information on this book the first thing you will read is a statement warning you Smiley's A Thousand Acres takes Shakespeare's King Lear and sets it on a farm in Iowa. Anytime someone decides to use a Shakespearean tragedy as inspiration you know the end result is not going to be a happy one. There will be suffering, there will be death, and in the end you'll find yourself wishing you'd reached for something a little more upbeat at the library, like Crime and Punishment or The Metamorphosis. 

Just to be sure no one misses the connection with King Lear, Smiley gives the three daughters in the novel names that echo the three in the play. Instead of Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia, we're introduced to Rose, Ginny, and Carolyn. Just as in the play, the two older daughters spend their time agreeing with whatever their father suggests while the youngest questions the old man's decisions and judgement. 

Rose and Ginny stayed on the family farm even after marriage (their husbands moved to the farm rather than the women moving to where the spouses might have preferred to live). They've been unpaid housekeepers for their aging father since their teenage years, which is when their mother died, and have figured out the easiest way to deal with their father is to keep their mouths shut and let him do what he wants. If he drinks too much and drives while intoxicated, well, they're not happy about it but they refuse to do anything. If he goes on a spending spree and buys new furniture for no apparent reason, they'll just sit back and let him do it. 

Carolyn, on the other hand, is enough younger that she never fell into the acting as a live-in maid trap her sisters did. She also missed on some of the truly bad stuff that happened when her mother died but doesn't realize just how much her sisters protected her from the worst dysfunction. She left home for college and never came back except to visit. She's now an attorney living in Des Moines and sees the farm and her father in a very different way than her sisters. Her reaction to her father's odd or self-destructive behavior is to lecture Rose and Ginny on the need to keep an eye on the old man and to stop him from doing the stuff he does. Carolyn is clueless as to why her sisters are so passive, and of course they're never going to tell her. Among other things, if they did, it would torpedo Smiley's plot long before she got to her planned ending. Readers may mutter, "What the. . .?" but once an author has committed to an outline, the dominoes have to keep falling. 

As the novel progresses, Smiley throws in an ever growing list of bad things happening: marital infidelity, unrequited love, attempted murder, tragic accidents, child abuse and incest revealed after decades of denial, divorce, corporate greed, bad advice from bankers, foreclosures, auctions. Yes, the play that was the inspiration was full of bad stuff, too, but the litany of woes in A Thousand Acres turns a bit ridiculous by the time you get to the end. You name it, it's there. But you keep right on reading because Smiley can write.  

Bottom line on the book: it is extremely readable, it's well written and holds your interest, but let's face it, Smiley has managed to kitchen sink so many tragic elements that they risk becoming cliches -- the old man isn't just a drunk, he's a child beater! one of the sisters doesn't just resent a sibling, she plans to poison her! -- it comes close to qualifying as Iowa corn. 

The skirting so dangerously close to turning a tragedy into a farce makes it hard for me to do my usual rating on the 1 to 10 scale. It's good, but it's definitely not great. A six maybe? Slightly better than average, but not up near the high end.

Next up: A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Butler Olen. The online catalog describes it as a collection of short stories so it will be a change from the usual novels. It will, of course, be another Interlibrary Loan request.