A Thousand Acres in Reading with Style

May 05, 2015 Bucket rated it it was amazing

Shelves: identity, women, life-and-death, reviewed, tragedy, culture, sex, literary, generational-epic, parents-affecting-children

ALERT: If you aren't familiar with the plot of King Lear, there may be slight spoilers below.

My complaint about Shakespeare's King Lear was that motives were completely unclear. There was little indication for how Goneril and Regan became so villainous, and also little explanation for Lear's erratic decision-making that causes him to continuously make things worse.

In A Thousand Acres, Smiley fully solves one of these problems. In her version, the sisters Ginny and Rose are very depthful creati ALERT: If you aren't familiar with the plot of King Lear, there may be slight spoilers below.

My complaint about Shakespeare's King Lear was that motives were completely unclear. There was little indication for how Goneril and Regan became so villainous, and also little explanation for Lear's erratic decision-making that causes him to continuously make things worse.

In A Thousand Acres, Smiley fully solves one of these problems. In her version, the sisters Ginny and Rose are very depthful creations, with histories and personalities that make their actions and decisions mostly easy to understand (with the possible exception of Ginny's attempt to poison Rose). She endows these women with the complex histories they deserve to have made clear.

That said, Smiley doesn't do the same with Larry (the Lear father figure). His motives are not clear at all, and he becomes the extreme villain that the sisters are in Shakespeare's play. Particularly when his history of abusing his daughters comes out, he becomes a flat character whose uncontrollable urges have led him to madness. I don't demand that he inspire reader sympathy or anything, but it would have been nice for him to be more well-rounded.

Very early in the novel, Jess Clark (the Edmund character) says to Ginny: "Anyway, I always think that things have to happen the way they do happen, that there are so many inner and outer forces joining at every event that it becomes a kind of fate."

I felt exactly this way throughout my reading of the novel. First, because I already knew the story of King Lear, I knew that certain events would have to happen and that the story would end in tragedy, no matter what. But moreso than this, the reader is able to see many of these 'inner and outer forces' and so has to watch hopelessly as the characters are deal with the constant aftermath of decisions made or words spoken without any clear sense of how they got to that place. Everything happens so quickly and comes out of nowhere so it seems to be fate, though all of it is dependent on conscious and often unconscious feelings and decisions. Things that didn't have to be, up to and including the transfer of the farm and Ginny's miscarriages, seem very much like they had to be.

Overall, I was really impressed with how well Smiley manages the monumental task she set for herself: reinterpreting Shakespeare. I was also glued to the story from the start; it was very engaging and caused plenty of emotional turmoil. I found myself partway between Rose's selfish, angry perspective and Ginny's giving, forgetting and harmony-at-all-costs perspective. Part of the tragedy of the story (and of rural farm family life according to the novel) is that Rose and Ginny never release enough of their secrets and communicate enough to learn these perspectives from each other.

Themes: Shakespeare, family, ambition, tradition, relationships, gender roles, abuse, environment, rural, secrets, generational conflict ...more

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Mar 26, 2009 Cindie rated it it was amazing

This was my first Jane Smiley book and I think I read it in my very first book club. I love Shakespeare, and I love (good) Shakespeare ripoffs/retelling. I loved the way Smiley turned the story around and gave us a new view of the characters. I saw a version of Lear on stage 20 years ago. It was set in the Reconstruction South and all the male characters were women, and visa versa. It also had no ending. I liked that, so A Thousand Acres, I loved...

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