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November 3, 1991

King Lear in Zebulon County

By RON CARLSON

t is hard to resist comparing Jane Smiley's big new novel, "A Thousand Acres," to
"King Lear," but I'm going to try. Does an imperious and
domineering father divide his domain and leave the
A THOUSAND
youngest of his three daughters out? Does this lead beyond ACRES
mayhem to tragedy? Is someone blinded? Is there a storm? By Jane Smiley.
Well, yes, and a dozen other yeses, but this powerful and
poignant book doesn't lean against Lear for support. Jane
Smiley takes the truths therein and lights them up her way,
making the perils of family and property and being a daughter real and personal and
new and honest and hurtful all over again. And where? In Iowa.
A farm of a thousand acres is a magnificent thing. Certainly Larry Cook's place stands
as one of the largest landholdings in Zebulon County. Amassed in deals that arose
from his neighbors' failures, the farm is a tribute to Larry Cook's single-minded
shrewdness.
It is May of 1979, and when a neighbor, Harold Clark, holds a community pig roast to
announce the return of his prodigal son, Jess, Larry Cook uses the occasion to
announce -- surprisingly -- that he is giving his farm to his daughters: Ginny, Rose
and Caroline. At the last minute, angered by her seeming hesitance, he cuts Caroline,
the youngest, out of the grant. Those rich and fertile thousand acres will do more
damage to a family than any real estate since the cherry orchard.
Ginny Cook narrates the book from her position as the oldest daughter, 36 that year;
but in so many ways she is the youngest, the most callow, the slowest to judge. This is
one of Ms. Smiley's finest strokes, the selection of her storyteller. For Ginny is
neutral, without agenda, at times as stolid as a farm animal -- almost reluctantly drawn
into the events of the summer, events that will force her into discovering the true
nature of her family and her past.
It's Ginny's strange innocence that accompanies us through the novel and lends the
story a marvelous and personal tension so credible it is chilling. She's the kind of
person who, despite lingering sadness at being childless after several miscarriages, is
still perked up by the sight of the colors of a Monopoly board. She is married to Ty
Smith, a good farmer, an orderly and blameless man. She is also the caretaker of the
group; at the time the novel opens, she's cooking breakfast in three houses -- hers, her
father's and her sister Rose's. Rose, at 34, is recovering from a mastectomy.
Ginny's sisters are already more worldly wise than she. Rose has always been a realist,
holding her emotions at arm's length. She says of her grandfather and father on the
farm: "First their wives collapse under the strain, then they take it out on their children
for as long as they can." She has kept score and lives for retribution. When her
husband, Pete, broke her arm four years before, she made a sleeve for the cast that
said, "PETE DID THIS." Rose and Pete live with their two daughters across the road
from her father.
Only Caroline, 28, has escaped her father's world; she has become, along with her
husband, Frank, a lawyer in Des Moines. The youngest, the prettiest, the most
successful, Caroline was raised by her sisters after her mother's death. It is her "I don't
know" when the question of returning to the farm first arises that labels her a
thankless child. Larry Cook has never been a tolerant man.
He has also never been a man for whom anything but the land really mattered, and
giving up the farm that was his life unmoors him. In what was supposed to be his
retirement, he becomes a quarrelsome wanderer, setting off a series of events that
leads to a tempestuous denouement. Typically, one of the first of these events is
seemingly unimportant: buying new kitchen cabinets that sit where the delivery men
left them, out in his yard unprotected from the weather, like a beacon to the
community -- something is wrong. His sullen idleness, his drinking, his smoldering
anger lead him down a path of accident and rancor, from Ginny to Rose to his best
friend, Harold Clark, to Caroline and finally to court. He can't talk, but he can curse.
As the Cooks' problems intensify, a stranger comes to town. Jess Clark, who went to
Canada during the Vietnam War, has returned after several years. For Ginny and
Rose, he's a welcome addition to the community, and in a wonderful early scene a
marathon game of Monopoly becomes a way of exchanging news, about everything
from Jess's views on organic farming to what is being said in town about Larry Cook's
daughters. Jess's involvement with Ginny and Rose becomes the key to Ginny's
awakening to herself, to her full understanding of Rose.
Jane Smiley knows that the forces at play in any rural society are powerful and not
unsophisticated. There is nature to contend with. There's the housewives' constant
struggle to keep the farm out of the house. And there is the rivalry of farmer against
farmer, the competition for success with the crops, with machinery and with the bank
-- which ends sometimes in vying for one another's farms. Ginny remembers her
father looking across the road at the Ericsons' place. "We might as well have had a
catechism," she says. "What is a farmer's first duty? To grow more food. What is a
farmer's second duty? To buy more land." Larry Cook closed the Ericson deal on the
day of his wife's funeral.
Ms. Smiley's portrait of the American farm is so vivid and immediate -- the way
farmers walk, what the corn looks like, the buzz of conversation at the community
dinners -- that it causes a kind of stunning nostalgia. It reminds us that the passing on
of farms is always difficult -- and that the farmer's inherent character makes it even
more so. The distance from the main house to the son's or daughter's across the road is
one of the most tangible embodiments of the generation gap.
And all these struggles are played out under the gaze of the community. The flat
farmland is a fishbowl. For miles one can see whose crops are thriving, whose barn is
painted, whose car is headed for town or returning and at what hour. Jane Smiley's
townsfolk -- the bankers, neighbors and family friends -- are the Greek chorus here. In
fact, there is something fundamentally Midwestern about a chorus, about all that
caution. The community is slow to change, hardly warm to Larry Cook's decision.
There are surprises in this book, things to be uncovered, events that turn in ways more
radical and permanent than we would have supposed. When sister talks to sister in the
kitchen or on the phone or in the courtroom, Ms. Smiley brings us in so close that it's
almost too much to bear. She's good in those small spaces, with nothing but the
family, pulling tighter and tighter until someone has to leave the table, leave the room,
leave town. And she's good in the big spaces -- this region is hers now, intuited and
understood, and delivered with generous exactitude. Ms. Smiley's earlier work --
including the novellas "Ordinary Love & Good Will" and the story collection "The
Age of Grief" -- has been praised by the literary world. But "A Thousand Acres" is the
big book that will finally earn her the wider audience she deserves.
I was reluctant, in writing about the novel, to invoke "King Lear" (and it will be
invoked, believe me) because I didn't want this story to sound like an exercise, like
some clever, layered construct. What "A Thousand Acres" does is to remind us again
of why "King Lear" has lasted.
This is a book about farming in America, the loss of family farms, the force of the
family itself. It is intimate and involving. What, Ms. Smiley asks, is it to be a true
daughter? And what is the price to be paid for trying one's whole life to please a proud
father who only slenderly knows himself -- who coveted his land the way he loved his
daughters, not wisely but too too well?
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