A Thousand Acres
by Jane Smiley
Summary
Larry Cook owns a thousand acres of the best land in Zebulon County, Iowa, assembled over three generations by draining the wetland underneath it. At a pig roast in 1979 he announces that he is turning the farm into a corporation and dividing it between his three daughters. Caroline, the youngest, a lawyer in Des Moines, hesitates for one second, and is cut out on the spot.
Ginny and Rose take it on with their husbands. Their father starts drinking and driving, then throws things, then stands out in a storm shouting at his daughters that they are unnatural, and the county takes his side because a man who built a farm is owed something.
Ginny narrates, and she is careful, accommodating and unreliable about her own life. Roughly halfway through, Rose tells her what their father did to both of them in the years after their mother died, and the whole novel reorganises itself: every accusation of ingratitude, every neighbour's sympathy, every sentence Ginny has told you about her childhood.
Smiley wrote it as King Lear from Goneril's side, and it works completely without the Shakespeare. What she adds is the land itself: the drainage tiles laid by their grandfather, the fertiliser running into the well, the string of miscarriages that Ginny mentions plainly for two hundred pages before anybody connects them to the water she has been drinking.
The farming detail is exact and never decorative, and the neighbours, the auction and the lawsuit are as tense as anything with weapons in it.
At around three hundred and seventy pages it builds slowly, in a flat and reasonable voice, which is what makes the middle turn hit as hard as it does. Best for readers who want a domestic novel that becomes something much darker, and who do not need a comfortable ending.
Historical Context & Significance
A Thousand Acres won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award.
Jane Smiley taught at Iowa State University for fifteen years and wrote it during the farm crisis of the 1980s, when high interest rates and collapsing land values forced tens of thousands of American family farms into foreclosure, so the corporation Larry Cook forms in 1979 was a real and common piece of tax advice with real consequences.
Her stated aim was to answer the play by asking what a family would have to look like for Goneril and Regan to be right. Jocelyn Moorhouse filmed it in 1997 with Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange and Jason Robards, and the adaptation was widely judged to have flattened exactly the material that made the novel work.