Even after three readings, I still love Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres and I still get so much out of it. It’s a powerful story of children and their parents, men and women, bad decisions and repercussions. It’s a retelling of King Lear, set on a Midwestern farm in the 1980s. It might seem like a bit of a come down for Lear, from king to farmer, but it works. In fact, I think it works better than the original Lear. I never understood why Lear would give up his kingdom, but I can understand the motives of Larry Cook in dividing up his farm among his children.
After the farm is divided, the plot of A Thousand Acres follows King Lear fairly closely, even down to the ranting in the storm scene. But instead of getting the story from Lear’s perspective, we get the story from the eldest daughter’s perspective. Smiley transforms Goneril into Ginny Cook. At the beginning of the novel, Ginny avoid conflict. She pacifies her father as much anyone can a man who is sliding ungracefully into dementia. She tries to keep her family from fighting. But there are old wounds that no amount of soothing are going to heal. But in pondering the narrator switch, I again realized how much who your narrator is matters when it comes to getting the reader’s sympathy. I’ll admit that I never gave Lear much sympathy, because I thought he was an idiot. But when I got the story from his perspective, his two eldest daughters were truly horrible creatures. When I got the story from Ginny’s (Goneril’s) perspective, I could see how stuck the eldest daughters were. It’s hard to tell a parent they’re making a bad choice, especially when they can’t take criticism. And Larry definitely can’t take criticism. He screams and rants and insults when he gets even a whiff of criticism or contradiction.
The other thing that struck me about this book was how hard it is to apportion blame. And when you don’t know who to blame, how can you put such a fantastic screw up behind you and move on? After the farm is divided, Larry’s dementia (or whatever it is) gets worse. The farm goes into debt modernizing. A neighbor stirs up bad feeling. And a revelation about just how badly Larry treated his eldest daughters complicates the whole picture. After the storm scene, Larry moves off the farm and the youngest daughter Caroline (Cordelia), a practicing lawyer, comes in to try and get the farm back for him. I thought that all the major characters and a good number of the minor ones all carry a piece of the blame. Reading closely, I could also see how important perspective is to even the characters. Everyone has their own version of events. Those who line up on Ginny and Rose’s (Reagan’s) side have a clear understanding of Larry’s mental state and what’s really happening on the farm. Those who line up on Larry’s side are only getting his story. It’s almost like watching King Lear inverted, like the story we’re used to getting is being shown to a different audience somewhere and we get to see what happens between all the scene breaks or hear monologues for these characters that weren’t really written.
This is an amazing book.