Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres is King Lear set in rural 1980s Iowa and--in an interesting twist--told by Goneril, who here is called Ginny. Ginny's father (the Lear analogue) is a difficult and stubborn farmer who impetuously decides to give all of his land to his three daughters. Unfortunately, his favorite daughter Caroline rebuffs his offer, and so he is left to the tender mercies of Goneril and Rose (Regan). The resulting family drama quickly devolves into tragedy.

A Thousand Acres draws very little of its power from its source material. This is meant to be a compliment. Modern adaptations of classic works risk becoming stale in the translation, or--even worse--attenuated, as the adapter willy-nilly chops away elements of what was once an organic whole. ("Avant-garde" productions of Shakespeare's plays invariably exhibit these faults.) By narrating A Thousand Acres from the perspective of one of King Lear's villains, Smiley has deliberately divested herself of that play's emotional core, which has always centered around the pain of filial ingratitude and the (delayed) recognition of genuine love. At the same time, Smiley's book riffs on unexplained gaps from the original Lear, such as Cordelia's lengthy absence (true love indeed) and the background of the animosity between Lear and his two other daughters. The result is a novel that interlocks neatly with its inspiration without seeming to crib from it.

By transposing Lear to Iowa, Smiley has also added a few nice touches. One of the oddest things about King Lear has always been the emptiness of Lear's kingdom: except for occasional mentions of the hundreds of knights he carts around, the entire play might as well have taken place in a small town. That's exactly where Smiley locates A Thousand Acres, in a small Iowa farming community where families have known each other for generations and (as the lovely opening chapter relates) have nursed grudges for almost as long. When Ginny and Rose's father seems to go mad, the suffocating closeness of the setting makes an already disconcerting event intolerable. Ginny's neighbors may argue for decades about the borders of their land, but they recognize almost no boundaries on others' private lives. The bulk of the novel involves Ginny watching helplessly as her neighbors take sides in the emerging battle between her and Rose, on one side, and her father, Caroline, and their husbands on the other. Her attempts to forestall tragedy are few and disastrous; but mere acceptance is also impossible.

Smiley captures perfectly the troubled relationship between Ginny and the various members of her family, and the insidious infection of the entire community by their troubles. The original Lear was eccentric but harmless, his madness the product of naivete. The madness of Ginny's father, by contrast, is a darker beast: malicious, underhanded, fickle, and--worst of all--incomprehensible. Similarly, Caroline's distance in the novel, which seemed so excusable with Cordelia, takes on the aura of aloofness; her return reeks of condescension. As a result, the tension between the members of this family is poisonous but sensible, grounded as it is not in misunderstandings but in all sides' justifiable perceptions of the others. The expansion of the conflict into the community seems reasonable as well. With the possible exception of Ginny's father, nobody in A Thousand Acres is willfully evil, malicious, or irrational. Nevertheless, lives go to hell.

Smiley is not the most beautiful of writers out there, but in A Thousand Acres she is one of the most insightful. Ginny drops startlingly accurate nuggets of observations in her narration, seemingly without realizing it, and very few sentences in the novel do not resonate with considered honesty. What hit hardest for me were Ginny's reflections on the disjunction between her love for her father and their total lack of emotional closeness. I don't know if every child pauses at some point to consider how you can feel so strongly about your parents while in fact knowing so little about them, but I have, and Smiley's novel brought those moments of pained introspection back to light.

A Thousand Acres does ring false in at least two places. To avoid spoilers, I won't discuss them in detail, but they concern the explanation for Rose's hatred of their father, and some sausages that Ginny makes. Rose's explanation was one of the few places where I thought the book descended into unnecessary melodrama; although I don't want to trivialize what she describes, it felt like a cheap shot. And Ginny's sausages, while faithful to the original Lear, seemed wholly out of character. I'm glad that Smiley ultimately makes very little of them.

Copyright © 2005 Steven Wu