Product Description

The Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling novel from one of America's greatest contemporary writers. Larry Cook's farm is the largest in Zebulon County, Iowa, and a tribute to his hard work and single-mindedness. Proud and possessive, his sudden decision to retire and hand over the farm to his three daughters, is disarmingly uncharacteristic. Ginny and Rose, the two eldest, are startled yet eager to accept, but Caroline, the youngest daughter, has misgivings. Immediately, her father cuts her out. In A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley transposes the King Lear story to the modern day, and in so doing at once illuminates Shakespeare's original and subtly transforms it. This astonishing novel won both of America's highest literary awards, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics' Circle Award.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #27474 in Books
• Published on: 1992-10-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Ageing 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 cut-throat lenders. In this winner of the US 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Smiley captures the essence of such a life with stark, painful detail. --Amazon.com

Review
'A Thousand Acres is a strong, gnarled shocker of a novel! superb. Its success is down to Smiley's ambitious gusto, her intuitive handling of the relationship between character and landscape, and her willingness to haul genuine moral freight across the panorama she has so expertly painted.' Sunday Times 'Epic fiction of the very highest order, naturalistic , penetrating and wholly absorbing.' Literary Review 'Superlative, extraordinary, amazing. A Thousand Acres is a great American tragedy about the failure of a family's land and the failure of its love. There may have been better novels than A Thousand Acres, but I fear I didn't read them -- a haunting inquisition into the decline and fall of a family.' Independent 'A studied, ingenious variation on the brutal clashing of sexes and generations in King Lear. Its style is relaxed, conversational, unhurried; the novel flows gently onwards like a broad river. In its solidity and poise, A Thousand Acres is a book that will outlast this year's rainy season.' Vogue 'Powerful, poignant, intimate and involving.' New York Times

About the Author
Jane Smiley is one of America's greatest contemporary novelists. The author of seven other novels, she taught at Iowa State University before moving to California to concentrate on her writing.

Customer Reviews

Rage, emptiness & cosmic irony; but with an unexpected focus
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.

A dark, compelling and haunting retelling of the Lear story
A modern setting for the story of Lea in the mid-West of America, with a twist in the plot which is gradually revealed. As the power of the father and of the family declines, eldest daughter Ginny tells her tragic story. Jane Smiley creates with enormous skill the suffocating atmosphere of a family in which relationships are riven with dark secrets and unfulfilled dreams. The mundane everyday details of farm life lend even more weight to the tragedy of the protagonists, where what is not said becomes gradually more sinister than what is. A wonderful, brooding tragedy which gives more ambiguity to the characters of Lear.

A difficult and unrewarding read
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.