A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Apart from the conceit that this is a re-writing of King Lear, (because that begs us to consider this book as not being its own work), I found that Jane Smiley is an excellent author.
What seemed slow in the beginning, was really only such because we had to understand what was at stake.
Each instance of re-entering the story, of which the breaks in the narrative gave us (in terms of chapters or books) gave Smiley a chance to exploit the break in narrative to re-enter the plot in a different way. By establishing these different directions from which to view the narration (as of yet), she explored various strands in the family, in the landscape, in the town history. With each break, we sink deeper into Ginny (our narrator) to come to a different, and sometimes seemingly contradictory, angle from which to consider what was to be one continual complex totality.
Smiley is a brilliant author, although there are a few readers, if you read other comments, who did not get her work. Who wanted her to hinge on something bigger. Perhaps Iowa farmers are too cliche; oh of course they are simple townfolk, so what? Of course they are corrupt, (incestual, selfish, greedy), so what? Of course they are tied to the land; we don’t see the point of these endless descriptions.
The ending though is a good particular clue. What Smiley does, and what most stories that “speak to us” do, is that they get to the “universal humanity” by outlining traits expressed by at times, very contingent contingencies. By grounding the distinctiveness of the scene with the landscape, Smiley pulls us in, as Balzac might, with a wide angle that narrows onto very specific very particular figures against what seems like an endless parade of earth. We see their growth from the beginning to end, their attitudes and their inexplicable character differences as being both substantive and singular. Their contradiction is that they are the same, but they are also different… we can’t understand why they are different when they grew from the same stock. We can’t understand why the Father did what he did, or why one sister did this or another sister did that. We can only grasp that they did it, and look at the various artifacts Smiley narrates to us as evidence or a fingerprint that they did.
As Smiley examines each of the characters of that young adult generation of farmers, we see their individuality shine, fade and mutate into different character traits, expressed through Ginny. What lesser writers are unable to do is to explicate how their narrators can be so particular (limited in their worldview) and yet expose for us readers a richness that they seem unaware of, and Smiley at times, does suffer a little from this. Nonetheless, each character becomes only as deep as Ginny is able to connect with them, and their fading away, such as Jess or Ty, really only bespeaks of their (un)stable presence for her. In everyday life, we understand people via how we connect with them. Those aspects with which we do not connect are centers we have no access to. Literally.
So, as the book goes on, the characters and complexity of the plot rises until the action must come to a crash. Like trains on a track must go as they are defined to go, as trains are made to go forward and the track goes straight until it must turn… the complexity of the characters provides an unfolding of the plot which then unfolds the characters themselves. When faced with their reality of what they want for each other, the characters come to an apex, and must scatter. Because nothing can stay the same forever, their realizations tear their family apart as what they want for themselves is overcoded by what they want for each other.
In the very end, Smiley implodes the characters as a series of Ginny’s own admirations, aspects of different attributes. She knows herself through the people around her, just like she doesn’t know herself by the diners (and therefore she doesn’t know herself when she is in the diner). Smiley exploits this connection at the end, highlighting through the disconnect of each character, aspects of Ginny as she dismantles Ginny by dismantling the family. Self knowledge for our brave narrator is knowledge of how she is connected, and what she is as she destroys each aspect of those connections, removes, them, examines them, and sees in herself how she is very much like the Father she opposes, that she cannot run from, what she and her sister can only have, despite losing everything else; that the last part of themselves is beyond the understanding of others, that last singularity of will that even in the darkness of eradicating everything she is, she comes to grasp as the inexpressible hypostasis of being best only expressed by the horrific inexplicable action that goes against the grain of everything nice and acceptable about a respectable, dignified man, a pillar of the community in a small town of farmers. By wrapping the last inexplicable point of abjection, Smiley lets us come back around to totalize the entire episode.
This is a rare high point in any novel. Arguably, Smiley does it in her own way (of course that is her own genius), but she does it nonetheless, as a highlight of what is the same even after everything else is lost, ripped apart, and disintegrated. This is a novel of being.
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