A Thousand Acres: A Novel (Paperback)

by Jane Smiley (Author) "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..." (more)
Key Phrases: hog operation, tile lines, drainage wells, Jess Clark, Mason City, Marv Carson (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Aging Larry Cook announces his intention to turn over his 1,000-acre farm--one of the largest in Zebulon County, Iowa--to his three daughters, Caroline, Ginny and Rose. A man of harsh sensibilities, he carves Caroline out of the deal because she has the nerve to be less than enthusiastic about her father's generosity. While Larry Cook deteriorates into a pathetic drunk, his daughters are left to cope with the often grim realities of life on a family farm--from battering husbands to cutthroat lenders. In this winner of the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Smiley captures the essence of such a life with stark, painful detail. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
If Smiley ( Ordinary Love & Good Will ) has previously been hailed for her insight into human nature, the moral complexity of her themes and her lucid and resonant prose, her new novel is her best yet, bringing together her extraordinary talents in a story of stunning insight and impact. "Our farm and our lives seemed secure and good," says narrator Ginny Cook, looking back on the summer before her father capriciously decided to turn over his prosperous 1000-acre Iowa farm to his three daughters and their mates. That was the same summer that Jess Clark, their neighbors' prodigal son, returned after a 13-year absence, romance and peril trailing in his wake. Although Ginny's existence as a farmer's wife and caretaker of her irascible, bullying, widower father is not easy, there are compensations in her good marriage, in the close companionship of her indomitable sister Rose, who lives across the road, and in sharing vicariously in the accomplishments of their younger sister, Caroline, a lawyer. Having managed to submerge her grief at being childless, passive Ginny has also hidden a number of darker secrets in her past. These shocking events work their way out of her subconscious in the dreadful aftermath of her father's decision to rescind his legacy, shouting accusations of filial betrayal. Like Lear's daughters, the Cook sisters each reveal their true natures in events that will leave readers gasping with astonishment. Smiley powerfully evokes the unrelenting, insular world of farm life, the symbiotic relationships between a farmer and his land as well as those among the other members of the rural community. She contrasts the stringencies of nature with those of human nature: the sting of sibling rivalry, the tensions of marriage, the psychological burdens of children, the passion of lovers. Her tightly controlled prose propels tension to nearly unbearable extremes--but always within the limits of credibility. In the end, she has raised profound questions about human conduct and moral responsibility, especially about family relationships and the guilt and bitterness they can foster. BOMC selection.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (December 2, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400033837
• ISBN-13: 978-1400033836
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (202 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #27,722 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A true tragic tale, February 27, 2007

By	Glen Engel Cox "www.engel-cox.org" (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

When this book was chosen by our book club for this month's theme of "tragedy," I approached reading it with some trepidation. There are a number of things that I don't care for in literature, and one of them is the family drama which centers on the drama as drama for its own sake, rather than to say something more about the world. Part of my bias against this kind of writing comes from having cut my eyeteeth on science fiction, the literature of ideas which, at its best, is about today as much as it is about a future. I also spent three years in a creative writing program where, god bless them, my fellow students seemed to spend a lot of time writing autobiographical stories that didn't have much to say beyond it sucks to grow up in fill-in-the-blank. The book had won a Pulitzer, and if there's anything I learned in my MFA classes on literature, an award was often a signal that a book was not for the reader but written for the critics. A Thousand Acres screamed to me from its cover that it was that kind of book, that focused on the dissolution of the family as seen through a retelling of the King Lear story. I shuddered.

But, really, I shouldn't have. Having previously read two books by Jane Smiley (the quite amusing MOO and the intelligent and thoughtful Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel), I should have given her the benefit of the doubt. Within the first fifty pages, I was surprised that Smiley had drawn me into her story, and while it was still fairly mundane (the family dog wasn't going to start talking on page 100, to my dismay), I found the voice of the narrator intriguing and wondered just how much of King Lear Smiley was going to be able to transpose to 1970s Iowa. Turns out, quite a bit, in a wondrously deft way that I would have termed a 'tour de force' if I used that phrase anymore.

The narrator is the eldest of the three daughters, and instead of a king dividing up his kingdom, the family farm is to be divided among the daughters somewhat early by forming a corporation in which he gives control of the farm to the children, in a sudden move that delights the older daughters and their husbands and alarms the youngest, who no longer lives on the farm nor has much to do with it. Her concern about the alacrity of his decision infuriates the father, so much that he cuts her out of the paperwork process and thus the land itself. Pretty much every plot point in the Shakespearean play is touched upon in some manner, but never so roughly that the connections feel strained. If anything, Smiley's version is much, much more subtle in its understanding of the character's motivations, giving both a sympathetic portrait of the older two sisters that is entirely missing in the play, as well as making the Lear figure less of a madman and more of a stubborn one, such that when his stubbornness leads him into the rain, his madness becomes if not sensible, at least reasonable. You don't necessarily take any one character's side in this fight, but none seems such a villain.

What Smiley does that, I think, one-ups Shakespeare even more than making the female characters sympathetic is that she truly makes the tragedy about the land as about the people. In the background, and infusing everything the character's do to a point, is the thousand acres of the title. Perhaps it is because it is hard for us to imagine a kingdom as something one can own and pass to your children, for it's very easy to grasp the concept of these thousand acres, how much they mean to the family, and how tragic it is that this family cannot hold on to that land. In the past, I've been less than sympathetic to the concept of the family farm, but even my cold heart can't read what Smiley has described here and see it as anything but a tragedy.

What this novel has over the modern literature that I feared it would be is not only a plot (people die here, not to mention being maimed and insulted and cruelly treated) but a larger meaning, and that big picture of this being more than just a personal tragedy, is what makes this worthwhile reading. Out of the group who read this for book club, I turned out to rate this book the highest, and that is to say, I recommend it strongly.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not for the squeamish reader, November 15, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: A Thousand Acres (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (Paperback)

I am a college student, and as a logical step after readingKing Lear in my literary analysis class, we then turned our focus on Athousand Acres. I can't say how glad I am that this book fell across my path. Throughout my book my opinions about the characters changed so often, that I didn't know who to trust and who was the good guy and who was the bad guy. I came in with the expectation that Larry and Caroline would be the heroes, and that even though Ginny was the narrator we would clearly realize that she is evil. However, the characterization in this book is so deep and intricate that it is nearly impossible to lable one character as truly evil, except for the surprising conclusion of Larry Cook, whom I hated with a passion. However, this book can not be read with the expectation that it will give the reader pleasure. Instead, it reaches into the very depths of your emotions and twists them around with so vigorous a hand that you are nearly sickened by some of the action in the story. This book has some of the greatest depth I have ever known in a novel, and incorporates many subjects and undertones into its plot.

47 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dark, brooding, over-the-top. King Lear? Who cares?, February 27, 2000

By	Douglas A. Greenberg (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: A Thousand Acres (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (Paperback)

As I read Jane Smiley's prize-winning novel, I tried my darnedest not to think about those much-ballyhooed parallels with *King Lear*. I find the "updated version of" phenomenon, which includes, for example, Helen Fielding's *Bridget* diary (*Price and Prejudice* update) to be gimmicky and distracting. Write your own novels, people!

That said, I can now declare that I think *A Thousand Acres* is a good, but not "great" novel. Jane Smiley is an excellent writer, and although the book starts a bit slowly, the momentum and intrigue build as pages fly by. Her ability to describe the landscapes, moods, and rhythms of midwestern farm life is commendable, and for me, this proved to be perhaps the most consistently satisfying aspect of the book.

The plot can only be described as "dark," perhaps excessively so to seem plausible. Incest, insanity, suicide, the casual plotting of vengeful murders--anything that might form the basis for an extended commentary on the possibilities for depravity in the Human Condition--it's all here! There is so much depravity here, in fact, that after a while I found myself (figuratively) rolling my eyes at each new twist in the plot. A bit over the top, Jane!

I confess that I found it dismaying that each and every male character in the book proved himself to be rotten, exhibiting behavior ranging anywhere from insensitive clottishness to manipulative and smarmy don Juanism to ranting, bullying, incest-practicing insanity. What a bunch of great guys! In all fairness, the women in the book aren't much better. The book's protagonist seems to be the one island of reasonableness until the surprising (and in my view, implausible) plot twist that proves that she, too, is capable of ANYTHING (I don't feel I should give the plot away here :-) ).

Overall, the book is gripping, well-written, and certainly worth reading. To my taste, however, Jane Smiley has gone a bit over the top in her portrayal of characters and in some aspects of the plot. The book ultimately turns into a veritable caricature of a "dark novel revealing the hideous inner secrets that lie behind the placid facade," blah, blah, blah.