Old-fashioned 70's Feminist Misandry
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There is plenty to admire in this book, which is why awarding it only one star wouldn't have felt right. I did not found the main characters convincing or `alive', there is no wit or irony in the book, and the story as a whole doesn't gel. But Smiley is a hard-working writer, and there is a wealth of detail about farming and farming techniques (presumably the result of detailed research) which feels educational. You come away feeling that you've learned something.
Also, although it suffers from many of the weaknesses of contemporary novels (especially the feeling that the whole is less than the sum of its parts) there is a passion which burns at the core of this book so you do feel that it is at least about something. It was apparently born out of a feminist desire to rewrite King Lear (sort of) from the point of view of the daughters. The daughters point of view, it transpires, is that of man-hating 70's feminists. Their world is one in which men are generally vile, sly and treacherous. There are only so many evil acts that you can pile onto the shoulders of the poor males, without turning the book into a melodrama (an ever-present threat); so Smiley has to work hard to convey their blanket wickedness by tone and atmosphere, and sometimes she struggles. When Harold, a neighbour, is blinded in a horrific accident, for example, and one of the daughters compares him to Hitler and says that he deserves no pity, the other daughter effectively poses the question - and you can't help feeling that she is articulating the very question that Smiley must have been asking herself, seated at the keyboard at this point - exactly what he has done that has put him so far beyond the pale. She resolves this little problem by coming up with an anecdote about how years earlier he apparently deliberately drove over a fawn on his cornpicker, and then callously left it to die - not so much melodrama as Disney.
Throughout the book, you never have a clue what the characters will do next, and this is mainly because they aren't credible personalities. Their dialogue is usually done well, but their actions aren't convincing. Yes some fathers abuse their children. But I wasn't at all persuaded that such men are remotely like the characters in this book.
Smiley's strength is in the externals, and in the detail - but she often overdoes even that. There are an awful lot of lists. A character can't open a medicine cabinet without Smiley listing every single thing inside it.
Smiley is described in the blurb at the back of the book as a `militant liberal'. She describes herself as a `nice person'. And yet ethically this is a dodgy book. We would know exactly what to think of it if the target were homosexuals, Jews, women, Muslims, etc. It is to be hoped that a future, more enlightened generation will also know what to think of a book that treats men as this one does.
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Astonishing Symmetries Sneak Subtleties into a Surprising Story
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Most modern novels fail to surprise me. They telegraph where they are going in such obvious ways that I often feel I could write the next chapters and the ending before I read them. Jane Smiley in A Thousand Acres also telegraphs a lot . . . but underneath those obvious road signs, she's built a more powerful message for those who care to read between the lines. Although most people don't want to read a book as long and as dark as this one, it's well worth your while. The character and plot developments display an amazing set of symmetries that are works of genius.
Those who will love this book the most are people who know farm life in the American Middle West well. Having had a grandfather, father and several uncles who were farmers in Illinois raising lots of corn and hogs, I was first impressed by how well Ms. Smiley captured the attitudes, experiences, psychology and perspectives of the American family farmer during the 1930s through the 1980s. I felt like I was reading the history of my own family for about the first third of the book.
Then, she powerfully shifts the ground as the patriarch of the family, Larry Cook, decides to cede control over the family farm to avoid estate taxes. From there, a superficial reading will see this as a modern version of King Lear. I think that obvious parallel is not an accurate view of the book. Instead, this book takes on the qualities of a Greek tragedy as the characters move inexorably towards their preordained fates. What's the source of the tragedy? It's the pride of the American family farmer who lusts for more land and production.
In fact, this book could have been titled "Life Drains Away" as the forces set into action by the characters create an ironic threat to some of the same characters.
I was most impressed by the subtle case being made for healthier farming methods and changed values among family farmers. Rarely does a novel make such an objective point with such power.
At times, you'll feel that the novel is more than a little over the top. But that's what makes the novel work as a tragic story. I do agree that Ms. Smiley could probably have cut back on some of the darkness, still made her point, and possibly had a masterpiece of a story. But some writers need to shake the heavens with their furies . . . and we can hardly blame them when they succeed.
Well done, Ms. Smiley!
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A difficult and unrewarding read
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I chose to read this after my mother gave it to me and I read all the rave reviews on the cover. Although I found it very well and emotionally written I have to say, I didn't like any of the charachers and therefore couldn't empathise or really care about what happened to them. Ginny especially came across as a very weak person and I believe the tiniest details of her everyday life (her houshold jobs, the dinner, what she was wearing etc.) was recounted to reflect that not much else was going on in her head. This was probably to blank out her horrific childhood of course but when it came to it she refused to stand up for herself or even confide in her husband and tried to poison the person who brought it all out into the light. Rose was probably the best of a bad lot! Even so, it did keep me engaged if only to find out if Larry got what was coming to him. But alas no! Read if if you don't mind feeling a curious anxiety but I have enough of that in real life.
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This book really gets to me
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I bought this book last August, and only now I got to read it. It was sertainly worth waiting for... Or, well, what 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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Rage, emptiness & cosmic irony; but with an unexpected focus
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Jane Smiley's darkly awesome Pulitzer Prizewinner has lost none of its impact fourteen years on from its initial publication in 1991. Her re-telling of the King Lear story has all the rage, emptiness and cosmic irony of the Shakespearean original, but it is Smiley's crucial change of focus that makes the book such an overwhelming experience. For the tragedy here is not that of Lear himself, the father who reluctantly relinquishes his power; but rather belongs to the three daughters who suddenly find themselves dealing with the fall-out of years of domestic tyranny and abuse. The Goneril and Regan figures, the two eldest daughters who cast their father out into the storm and collude in depriving their younger sister of her rightful inheritance, are (kind of) the Good Guys here. Smiley has a long, cold look at the original King Lear story, and tells us that if Goneril and Regan saw fit to treat their father and their sister in this way, well, maybe they had their reasons. And terrible reasons they must have been. The book is narrated by Ginny, eldest daughter of successful farmer Larry Cook, who owns one of the largest farms in his county, the regal Thousand Acres of the title. Ostensibly motivated by an urge to cheat the government out of death duties on his farm, he suddenly and unexpectedly offers each of his three daughters a third share in the farm. His youngest daughter Caroline, wary of his true motivation and of the darker undercurrents in the family dynamic, isn't keen on the idea and promptly gets cut out completely: Larry divides the farm between the two older girls Ginny & Rose. They are to farm the land with their husbands' help. However, Larry himself, aided and abetted by his wily clown of a neighbour Harold Clark, starts to behave increasingly oddly, stirring up bad feeling in the neighbourhood against Ginny and Rose. When Harold's charismatic younger son Jess returns from Canada, and Caroline pushes her father into a lawsuit to try to retrieve his farm, the stage is clearly set for tragedy - and tragedy is what we get. Smiley's aim here is primarily to give a voice to the sort of people who are never usually allowed the luxury of centre-stage soliloquies to explain their actions and motives: in particular, there is a subtle but definite post-feminist slant to her tale. Downtrodden and embittered Ginny is the perfect choice as narrator: Smiley gives her a voice of uncommon poetry, perhaps as some sort of compensation for her irredeemably blighted life. The fierce and egotistical Rose is equally finely done, and neither Ginny nor Rose ever really lose the reader's sympathy even as their actions become more and more extreme. On the other hand, the melodramatic ranting of the disinherited Larry Cook comes to seem more and more irrelevant, and unlike Shakespeare's Lear, Smiley never allows Larry to become a sympathetic character. He may be a monster who has lost his poison, but he remains a monster. Although virtually everyone in the tale ends up empty-handed at the end, and there is no public accounting for past crimes, there is a feeling that in some way, justice has been done. As one of the older sisters sums it up near the end of the book: "All I have is the knowledge that I saw! That I saw without being afraid and without turning away, and that I didn't forgive the unforgivable. Forgiveness is a reflex for when you can't stand what you know. I resisted that reflex. That's my sole, solitary, lonely accomplishment." Although this is a pretty dark read, it's a surprisingly exhilarating one too. Partly, this is the exhilaration in watching something getting smashed up that richly deserves to be smashed. But there is a lot more to it than that: Smiley creates characters of rare emotional complexity, and her use of language and metaphor is always beautiful. At the start of the book, Ginny muses over the fact that Larry's farm consists mainly of reclaimed marshland: there is a lost sea lurking just beneath the surface of the prairie. When Smiley strips back the ostensibly ordered lives of her farming family to show us the murky depths lurking there, it ultimately feels like a liberating experience.
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