Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres was first published in 1991, which is when I read it — before it got the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. That is, believe it or not, 18 years ago or in my personal way of telling time, 2 years PGC (post Girlchild).
There are many things to admire about this novel and some pretty serious flaws, as well. I didn’t get any big relevations or new insights on re-reading it almost twenty years later, but one of the major problems (as I see it) did seem more pronounced than I remembered.
If you are not familiar with the story at all, in a nutshell: it’s set on a big, successful, well run Iowa farm owned by an aging farmer, worked by him with the help of his two sons-in-law. The farmer decides to split all his holdings between his three daughters. One daughter hesitates because she’s unclear on his motivations, and he cuts her off. Once the transfer has taken place, the farmer begins to deteriorate quite quickly. He starts acting erratically, eventually reconciles with the third daughter, and together with her, sues the elder two daughters to get the farm back.
A character doesn’t have to be likeable to be good, but he or she does have to be compelling. The reader has to invest something in the character and the character’s actions; if that doesn’t happen, the book is more likely to be put aside and forgotten. In this novel, the two main characters are the farmer (Larry) and his eldest daughter (Ginny), and neither of them are very likeable. Ginny is the narrator, with a voice that is reasonable, observant, anxiety-riddled and somewhat monotonous. She has to deal with her sister Rose, who seems to run on an endless supply of anger, with Rose’s mercurial husband, with her own husband who is calm, patient, and passive-agressive, and with her father.
Any first person narrative is to some degree unreliable. Ginny’s unreliability is hard to judge, because she strives for such an even tone as she tells her story. It’s an deceptively selductive voice, drawing the reader in to her way of seeing things. At two points in the book she does very Bad Things, and she tells about these incidents with an almost preternatural calm and detachment. Rose wears her anger for all to see; Ginny doesn’t ever acknowledge her own. We see and hear a lot of Ginny, but we see her father and the rest of the family only through her.
You might find Ginny simply insipid and uninteresting or frustrating, or you might like her meditative and observant nature. I think it’s hard to write a character who has so very little self-knowledge and such an iron grip on denial, especially a first person narrator.
It’s Ginny’s father, however, who stands at the emotional center of this novel. Larry is described as a big, burly man with a deep rumble of a voice and a perpetual scowl. He has a big temper, too, and his adult daughters and their husbands dance to his tune. Rose propelled by fury, Ginny by fear of what will happen if she should challenge him.
There’s nothing likeable about Larry, but worse still: there’s no way to see into him. No sense of what motivates him beyond the obvious narcissism. The story starts when he makes a sudden decision to divest himself of the farm that has been his whole life, for all his life, and pass it on to his daughters. From what we can tell, this is a decision fueled by alcohol and perhaps, to some degree, by a life-long competition with another farmer. As we learn more about the past by getting Ginny’s memories and Rose’s — as they are related to Ginny — we like him even less, but there’s still no way to understand him.
There are sincerely, utterly bad people in the world. The news tells you about Idi Amin, but it can’t make you understand Idi Amin. It can only show you the results of his actions. A novelist doesn’t get off that easily. To show us the results of Larry’s actions over the course of his daughter’s lifetimes isn’t enough. We have to get some sense of how he ended up where he did, what drove him and how, no matter how unpleasant that backstory may be.
The Pulitzer Prize is given to a novel that portrays American life, and in this much, A Thousand Acres succeeds. It captures the culture and atmosphere of midwest farming in the late 70s, and it does that beautifully. The story is set in 1979, but it feels as though much more time as passed since the world looked like it does in this story.
This feeling of more-than-meets-the-eye time passing is something I also experienced when I watched the one-season television show Life on Mars. In it, a police detective is catapulted back in time to Manhattan, 1973. Everything about the setting — Manhattan streets, race relations, the way the kids played in the street, it all felt right to me. But it was the way people related to each other, the boys-club atmosphere of the police department which really struck me. I hadn’t exactly forgotten how difficult it was for women to break out of accustomed roles, how pervasive and blatant and offensive sexism was. I certainly remember a time when police violence was much more matter-of-fact and unapologetic. I myself came up in a time and place when the high school guidance counselor never even raised the possibility of college to girls, but had lots of brochures about secretarial and nursing school. I remember those things, but I had forgot the feel of them.
Good storytelling can do that. Move beyond the facts and the plots to recreate a mind-set and a view of the world that have drifted away. That maybe we don’t miss at all, but shouldn’t forget, either.
what you said