After reading Moo and part of Good Faith, I find Jane Smiley's writing to be so distinct. The only way I can explain it is that her narrative voice comes across as a friend telling me the story, yet with a subtle sarcasm underneath, as if she doesn't believe what she's telling me. It's actually really cool! I don't know anyone else that writes like that, except maybe Charles Dickens, a little bit. Also, Smiley tends to paint characters in a flawed yet likable way, which I think is a difficult thing to do. This makes her characters seem real.

Spoiler Alert! A Thousand Acres is very depressing. What do I mean by that? Well, to steal a line from Phoebe of Friends: "It should have been called 'It's a Sucky Sucky Life and just when you think it can't suck anymore, it does!'" Yep, from the opening line on, things just keep getting worse. I am really glad the main character survives--in the literal sense. People kept dying and being blinded and having to get jobs at Perkins... you just never knew what disaster was going to strike next. In a sense, this novel was all about possession. Of land, but also of another person's space. It was interesting how many of the themes overlapped. (This, by the way, is the key to writing a Pulitzer-prize winner!) Discord in marriage, horrible parenting, incestual rape, farming. It's all one and the same.

Even though it was REALLY DEPRESSING, I enjoyed this book. Because of Smiley's writing style itself (as aforementioned), but also because I finished reading the novel with a sense that the present is all about the past. Instead of trying to cover things up and go with the flow, confronting one's past is the way to move on. It was interesting to me that I felt good after reading this. It is one of those books that you keep thinking about days and weeks after reading. (It helps that my friend Bekah read it too, and I get to discuss it with her in a few days!) In some ways, I feel like everything I read in the book was a backwards lesson. In other words, DON'T handle things how these people did. Those are some of the best life lessons.

(Review from my blog: http://thenext100books.blogspot.com) ( )

A bittersweet novel about the decline of the family farm, the lack of choices for farm women, the scrutiny of the small town and the destructive secrets kept by families. ( )

This is the story of a farm - 1000 acres in Iowa - and the challenges that arise as the farm's owner, Larry Cook, passes the land on to his daughters, Rose and Ginny. Although the plot may sound simple, Smiley weaves in rich insights about human nature, relationships, and progress as the characters struggle to figure out what comes next in their lives and to deal with injuries from the past.

I have to admit that I read this book in short stretches over the course of 6 or 7 weeks. This is not because the book is not good, or did not hold my interest. On the contrary. Smiley captures the emotional ups and downs of these characters so well that the book felt too intense for me to read it straight through. I live in Iowa. I grew up on a farm in Missouri. I know people and situations like the ones about which Smiley writes. And usually that makes me more intensely critical of an author - quick to point out scenes that do not ring true. But Smiley writes with insight, showing multiple sides of complex situations and creating characters that are not caricatures but multi-dimensional and true. This is not an easy book to read, but it is beautifully written.

As a Pulitzer winner and member of the 1001 list this book has been on my tbr list for quite some time. I found the family dynamic fascinating and disturbing but also beautifully written. I still have Moo by Smiley on my shelf at home and hope that I find it as enjoyable as this one. ( )

It's been a long time since a book has made me hate a character (Larry Cook) and his actions so much, yet made me still want to keep reading. Told in a King Lear-esque fashion, this is a story of farm life in Iowa, and so much more.

This is the first of Smiley's that I've read, and I will definitely be reading more. ( )

Readable, and I quite liked Smiley's prose—particularly when it was describing the land on which the family lived, the ocean that lies beneath the farm land of Iowa—but overall this didn't work for me. There was a disconnect for me which only made sense when I found out that Smiley based A Thousand Acres on King Lear: it feels like there are plot details which have been shoe-horned in to the development of the novel purely so that it can echo the events of the play, and it's too artificial. With the exception of the main character, Ginny, Smiley also fails to make explicit or believable the motivations of the other main characters, I think relying on the reader to map the play onto the novel. Ultimately disappointing. ( )

A modernized King Lear, where a farmer, Larry Cook, decides to divide his farm into three pieces for his three daughters. While two go along with the plan, the youngest daughter, Caroline, voices reservations and is left out in the cold.

The book is told from the perspective of the older daughter, Ginny, as she watches her family change over the course of four-five years.

Made into a motion picture staring Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Colin Firth the story is all about family struggle, pain, deceit, forgiveness, jealousy, and death.

I’ve seen the movie a few times, but the book is much more than movie could ever be. It helped being able to picture faces to the characters but Smiley’s in depth struggle of this family and their traditions shows greatly through the written word. ( )

This is a fantastic book. If you are familiar with King Lear it adds an extra layer of resonance, but the book doesn't depend on those shared plot elements. I really felt for the characters and was surprised and moved by their actions. ( )

Rating: A, Read the full review at my blog, http://literaturecrazy.blogspot.com/2... ( )

Readable and engrossing, with an insight into how we can block things from our mind. ( )

This is based on the story of King Lear, but set in a Midwestern farm in the late 1970s. Before I started reading the book I was quite sceptical - how was Jane Smiley going to make the story credible?

In fact, she does a wonderful job.

In the first 20 pages you have all the elements. A stubborn man, who knows exactly what he thinks is right, and who is used to making his own world around him (the land which Laurence Cook farms was created out of marshland - "However much these acres looked like a gift of nature, not of God, they were not. We went to church to pay our respects, not to give thanks"). A sense of the fragility of familial relations - stories of other families in which "generations of silence ... flow from a single choice", not to mention the precariousness of everything which looks most secure ("the grass is gone, now, and the marshes ... but the sea is still beneath our feet, and we walk on it"). And finally, a stubborn comment from the youngest child, who refuses to indulge her father and "had simply spoken as a woman rather than as a daughter. That was something, I realised in a flash, that Rose and I were pretty careful never to do".

And you prepare for the tragedy to unroll. And it does - with a lot of parallels to the King Lear story (I think right down to the fact that the first 5 parts of the book mirror the events in the five acts of the play). But of course, what happens is not quite what you expect. And that brilliantly highlights one of the themes of the book - the fact that we all have our narratives about our lives (and the lives of other people), and the way that we respond to things which challenge those narratives. ( )

So you have an aging, ruthless patriarch on the verge of madness deciding on a whim to divide up his property among his three daughters precipitating a descent into tragedy. The story of course is William Shakespeare's King Lear, but also the basis of Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Thousand Acres (1991) set in Iowa in 1979. This book was the May selection of the William & Mary Boston Alumni Chapter book club, and once again I chose to listen to the audiobook.

Unlike Shakespeare's tragedy which sympathizes with the noble youngest daughter Cordelia, Smiley tells the story sympathetically from the point of view of the "evil" eldest daughter Ginny. The middle daughter - the outspoken Rose - and their husbands Ty and Pete are central characters while the youngest daughter Caroline is distant both emotionally and physically from the narrative. Looking for similarities with King Lear is a fun game and caught myself saying things like "Oh yeah, the old man goes out wandering in a terrible storm" and "Oh yeah, that guy is blinded." More King Lear parallels are available at this website.

Luckily, retelling Shakespeare is not the whole story. Smiley invests a lot of effort to make the reader feel and understand the meaning of the land to Iowa farmers. In Ginny she also creates a voice of the unreliable narrator. Ginny fills in a lot of detail with ruminations on the history of the land and the story of her family.

These details coincidentally are also a weak point of the novel because at times Ginny rambles on about some tangential detail shortly after a major plot point, and it really kills the narrative. I'm not sure if this is Smiley's problem or if it is a deliberate device to show how Ginny deludes herself. Other weaknesses are a failure to really flesh out the motivations and characters of the other principles. The whole thing seems to be a tempest in a teapot and does not reach a satisfactory conclusion. Not to mention that it's kind of a crazy joke to have a character named Pete married to a character named Rose.

So, I'll rate this book as good but not great. An interesting read with some real insight into the lives of Iowan farmers a generation ago, but a bit too melodramatic and too long for its own good. ( )

Minor spoiler elements: I mention briefly an event that takes place 1/4 or 1/3 of the way through the story. I do not, however, mention the main shocks/twists or the outcome.
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Do I feel angry or lost or just blasted like the prairie farm landscape after a dry summer storm? There is a grey and tragic pall over whatever it was I just experienced in Jane Smiley's "A Thousand Acres." It was as inescapable as a tornado, that book, both fascinating and destructive. At first there was just a hint of a tempest brewing, a stiff breeze and a feeling of having been startled--psychological tension--but then it got windier and windier and darker and finally shocking. And now I'm looking back on the story not knowing which way is up or if it was a tornado or just the hand of a deathless literary god.

Like a scavenger I have returned to the scene of the carnage in my mind to pick apart the corpses of the story and its characters. Smiley roughly formed the plot and its undertones around Shakespeare's King Lear (I can picture her piecing together this notion physically, like a potter at a wheel), and the frame of this hangs throughout the novel like loose clothes. Not quite hugging all of the curves, but a general fit. This is likely the best of possible circumstances: too much adherence and it would have slid beyond concept into rehash. Much less and it would have lost the plot entirely.

Our Lear is actually called Larry, an unlovable, demanding patriarch of a thousand-acre spread in Iowa. He starts as a one-dimensional curmudgeon antagonistic to change or confrontation. His three daughters, Ginny, Rose and Caroline (that is: Goneril, Regan, Cordelia in the play), orbit him in an apparent swath of appeasements and housekeeping. Our first glimpse of the Cook family is in grim snippets of submission, towing the line, servitude: a motionless destiny. Ginny and Rose's bland-faced husbands ride the cycle of farming and related demands, squashed under Larry/Lear's thumb.

In one drunk moment at a neighbor's party, Larry announces his intention to divide the farm between his daughters. One brief moment of hesitation on Caroline's part ends in a door slammed in her face and assumed, instant alienation from the rest of the brood. Readers of Shakespeare know how this goes.

For much of the book Larry's actions seem unmotivated, sprung from his thick head fully-formed, perhaps. He seems a demanding tyrnat. But then the whole book is inside out--it's Ginny (Goneril) who is our protagonist, who is narrating, who, in King Lear, is one of the conniving, treacherous sisters trying to grub as much possible land and power from her ailing father. Is Ginny winding her story around, dipping past events and motives she doesn't want us to see in her father and herself? What really did prompt him to give up the farm? Is Ginny evading, lying?

Ginny does have us in her hand. Enough so that the betrayal of her marriage (portrayed by her as blank and duty-bound, mostly) seems not a sin but a liberation she is entitled to. Instead, she would argue, it's Rose who is the insidious one, Rose who is evil and desperate and hopeless. Ginny is a pushover, sure, but we never get to know the depth of her guile. She has it hidden somewhere.

The first half of the book is intense but survivable. But the storm that unleashes both the symbolism and force of King Lear here also leads to darker days, secrets and unstoppable powers that are not escapable. There is very much a sense of no return, and it's hard to watch without incanting "oh, no, oh, no, oh no." We know from its outset it will be tragedy, the question is how far Smiley will take it.

Like a survivor of a storm myself now I feel ghostly and white and shaky. Shaky because the foundations of my understanding of Lear and Larry are tumbled upside-down and furious. Was Lear ever pitiable? Was there ever a suggestion in Shakespeare that he was anything but a vindictive patriarch? Or is Ginny pulling the wool over my eyes with such deftness that I missed the part when she was poisoning me? And whose truth is the real truth? This will require some thinking. ( )

Copy from back flap:

"A successful Iowa farmer decides to divide his farm between his three daughters. When the youngest objects, she is cut out of his will. This sets off a chain of events that brings dark truths to light and explodes long-suppressed emotions. An ambitious reimagining of Shakespeare' s King Lear cast upon a typical American community in the late twentieth century, A Thousand Acres takes on themes of truth, justice, love, and pride, and reveals the beautiful yet treacherous topography of humanity."

Jane Smiley writes a contemporary novel with many similarities to Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Lear. Not only will the plot details be familiar, but also the major themes as well as the main characters. What makes this story contemporary, is that it is told through the eyes of Ginny (Goneril). Considering the strong patriarchal theme of the play, this retelling from a female point of view offers to challenge those familiar with Shakespeare’s tragedy. It is almost as if you are getting to hear the other side of the story; one that would seemingly change the dynamics completely.

However, when reading this book, I became aware that when it comes to power, manipulation, generational conflict, obsession, and madness, gender really is not the determining factor nor are the ramifications significantly different than if this were as male dominated as the play.

Conflict in any style, by any means, has its own ‘life’. It feeds upon hate, and thrives by the inability of those involved to forgive. As noted by Ginny:

"We’ve always known families…that live together for years without speaking, for whom a historic dispute over land or money burns so hot that it engulfs every other subject, every other point of relationship or affection."

An aging father’s decision sets into motion a series of events that ultimately cost lives and destroys relationships. This is the similarity the novel has with the play. What differs is how it is told, and who dies, although I would mention that there are different types of death; spiritual and physical. Thus the correlation between the two becomes even more apparent.

I must admit I did not read every page of this book. However, I have never really gotten through all of King Lear either. The subject matter is dark, depressing, and at times frustrating. Smiley does well in updating and expounding upon Shakespeare’s tragedy. This was not an easy book to read, and I could not do it in one sitting as I have with others. In addition, I am guilty of ‘flipping’ through and speed-reading many passages.

Although deserving of a Pulitzer, I am only going to give it a 3 Star rating as I did put it down and often. But I always returned and did my best to muddle through. Any difficulty I had in dealing with the subject matter was my own, and in no way reflects upon Smiley's skill as an author. ( )

2527 A Thousand Acres, by Jane Smiley (read 8 Aug 1993) (Pulitzer Fiction prize in 1992) (National Book Critics Circle fiction award for 1991) This is a searing book. I did not like it, but it was riveting. I read it in a day and a half. The author doesn't really know what farm life was like but she sounds like she knows what it was like.. I thought the ending weak and contrived, and the theme is anti-farm, as well as anti-chemical, etc. There are no heroes or heroines in the book--none. It is overly dramatic and unreal in its courtroom scene. The judge in Mason City is from Sioux City, and there is talk of the "only straight road from Mason City to Sioux City"--there is no such road. The story catches one up, but it is basically a depressing story which annoys someone like me who sees farming through the rose-colored eyes of youth. ( )

I was made to read this novel in highschool and I hated it. I should add here that I had been sexually abused as a child by my grandfather and it just hit too close to home. Moreover he lived on a farm, died when I was in sixth grade and then my mom and dad moved us there to help support Grandma. I certainly wasn't ready to face up to that in highschool. I'm barely ready to face it now...

This is not a novel you idly force someone to read. There are tones and undercurrents in the novel that are dark and foreboding. It was emotional for me and I don't think I had it that bad considering some of the sex crimes that could have happened. Just... reader beware.

http://gr4c5.wordpress.com/2008/01/05... ( )

Book club read the book and then watched the movie. A couple key scenes were left out of the movie: Harold's accident and Ginny's trying to poison Rose - two major plot points! The differences made for a good discussion, and the issues involved helped it along too. ( )

"Our farm and our lives seemed secure and good," says narrator Ginny Cook, looking back on the summer before her father capriciously decided to turn over his prosperous 1000-acre Iowa farm to his three daughters and their mates. That was the same summer that Jess Clark, their neighbors' prodigal son, returned after a 13-year absence, romance and peril trailing in his wake. Although Ginny's existence as a farmer's wife and caretaker of her irascible, bullying, widower father is not easy, there are compensations in her good marriage, in the close companionship of her indomitable sister Rose, who lives across the road, and in sharing vicariously in the accomplishments of their younger sister, Caroline, a lawyer. Having managed to submerge her grief at being childless, passive Ginny has also hidden a number of darker secrets in her past. These shocking events work their way out of her subconscious in the dreadful aftermath of her father's decision to rescind his legacy, shouting accusations of filial betrayal.
Source: Novelist/Publisher weekly review ( )

Though it started somewhat slowly, by the end of A Thousand Acres I felt like I'd been on a rollercoaster or something- it actually left my heart pounding by the end. I know, I know... Iowa farm life circa 1979 does not sound like an exciting read, but dear god Jane Smiley can write when she wants to (very mixed reviews on her latest book... This is actually the only one I've read thus far, although now I'm definitely interested in reading more...). And I think Smiley has the "street cred" to write about life in Iowa... She got 2 degrees at the University of Iowa and then taught at Iowa State for a long time- writing about what she knows worked out for her in this case.

Anyway, A Thousand Acres is kind of a revisionist adaptation of King Lear. Because of this, the read is greatly enhanced by knowing something about King Lear. I'm not saying it's necessary to go read the play or anything, but the Sparknotes summary adds another layer to the experience: Summary I'm generally a sucker for that kind of thing- I like to re-examine the old from a new angle- but this really struck a chord with me. Instead of Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia, you get Ginny, Rose, and Caroline. And though I remember thinking the two older daughters were just basically greedy and evil in King Lear when he read it in high school, Smiley definitely shakes things up by having Ginny, the oldest daughter, be the narrator. In A Thousand Acres, plain evil is eschewed for multiple shades of grey.

A Thousand Acres is considerably more sympathetic toward the two older daughters and harder on the failings in the father and Caroline- at least internally. Interestingly, the spectators to the action within the novel still largely seem to view the two older daughters as evil, manipulative, and greedy, while their father is seen as heroically tragic- just what you're supposed to think at the end of King Lear. However, there's more to the story in A Thousand Acres, even if it doesn't become general knowledge or really change people's opinions. Indeed, what seems to be the real evil in A Thousand Acres is an unwillingness to accept anything beyond the surface- in other words, seeing things only in terms of black and white. More information makes things murkier, which the most frustrating characters avoid at all costs. The father and Caroline simply refuse to hear anything that they don't want to- anything that changes their core beliefs about themselves and their family. Interesting that Caroline is a lawyer, supposedly wanting all the facts to find the truth... Although I guess thinking in terms of black and white would actually be helpful for a lawyer- you only want to support your side of the case, afterall.

After reading this novel, I'm excited to watch the film adaptation sometime soon. I don't want to get my hopes up too much though.... I suspect the book blows the movie out of the water. The tagline of the movie is " Best friends. Bitter rivals. Sisters." (IMDB). This indicates to me that it'll probably concentrate on the falling out of the two older sisters. While that's important, I'm not sure it's the defining storyline of the novel... ( )

This is the first Jane Smiley book I read, in 1992, and I was much impressed. The King Lear story on an Iowa farm, told from the eldest daughter's viewpoint. Even so, suspenseful and subtle. Wonderful writing about farming, the land, and what happened to farmers in the 70's and 80's.

After I read this, I read some of her earlier stuff and didn't think too much of them, but her books from Thousand Acres on have been increasingly good (with the exception of Good Faith which I thought was only pretty good). ( )

http://www.engel-cox.org/2007/02/a_th... ( )

This book has that elusive quality that makes you want to keep reading it until its finished. I'm not sure its because I really cared what happened to the characters, it had more to do with wanting to read about everyday life on a farm. I thought the descriptions of cooking, canning and gardening were the most interesting and well written parts of the book.

Another interesting aspect of this novel is that its hard to identify with, or even like, the main character, Ginny. I thought I would like her better after she snaps out of her pathetic complacency, but her transformation is just as horrifying - and hard to believe. Why would she try to kill Rose if she loves her nieces so much? That felt inconsistent to me. Did Smiley mean for her to come across as a mild sociopath? What happened to her feelings? She feels no guilt or remorse for cheating and leaving her husband or trying to kill her sister. Then she walks away from the farm without so much as a look over her shoulder after she spent her whole childhood loving the place?

I might recommend this book to a female friend with no discerning taste, experience with miscarriages or an interest in farming. What little of the farm information I gleaned from this novel was pretty much everything I got out of it. Take it or leave it. ( )

I was very sucked into this book. I thought Smiley's ability to create dramatic tension was masterful. Although not spelled out until the end, you could just feel the reality of what those girls endured on every page -- the proverbial elephant in the room. ( )

A beautiful book that encapsulates the rule of 'real' family dramas - it can be life changing for those living it, but for neighbours it can be just fodder for the rumour mill.

Smiley has taken the story of King Lear and moved it to modern day Iowa, managing to retain the drama of a centuries old play and yet make it modern, accessible and relevant. This is not a happy story - there is so much pain, and you are left feeling cheated when bad people don't get what they deserve - but if anything it is worth the time even more because of this. The story is so engrossing that it is sure to entertain readers across a broad spectrum of interests, not only those who read 'farming dramas'. ( )