Jane Smiley’s “1000 Acres,” which won the
Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1992, is, on the surface, about an
Iowa farm dynasty whose members value, in deference to the family
patriarch, Larry Cook, the virtues of order, hierarchy, and
keeping up appearances, above all else. The farm’s lineage
was of swampland sold by shiftless speculators to Larry’s
grandparents, who turned their misfortune into a proverbial pot
of gold by irrigating the land and farming the rich topsoil
underneath.
Larry, at the time of this story, is sixty-eight years old. The
mother of his children is deceased, has been for decades. He
worries that his three grown daughters, Ginny, Rose, and
Caroline, would have to pay so much taxes upon his death, that
they would lose the farm. So he agrees a scheme hatched by Marv
Carson, a local banker, to incorporate, and transfer the title of
the land, which at the beginning of the story, in 1979, is valued
at over three million dollars. His youngest daughter, Caroline,
reacts with less than full enthusiasm to the plan, and Larry
responds by cutting her out of the title transfer. The oldest
daughter, Ginny, is also the narrator of the story, the one whose
faults seem less obvious, more forgivable, to the reader.
Once the title is transferred, Larry’s behavior becomes
increasingly erratic and difficult to control. What would be
described as a “rigid personality” gives way to an
unfocused, irrational side. He becomes paranoid, obsessed with
the idea that his older daughters are going to put him in a
nursing home. He has always expected them to fill in for their
mother, in preparing certain meals on certain days at certain
times, without variation. Now his anger becomes even more
disproportionate if meals are so much as a few minutes late, and
his drinking becomes more pronounced.
The timely arrival of Jess Clark, once a neighbor on a nearby
farm, now a returning draft dodger from the Viet Nam war, the
prodigal son of Howard Clark, sparks Ginny’s interest in a
way that her devoted husband, Ty, does not. Jess is seductive,
complicated, and brings with him an awareness of the dangers of
the status quo: When Ginny describes her five miscarriages, he
immediately curses, hitting upon the source of her condition:
nitrates in the well water, from farming runoff, that likely
caused Mrs. Clark’s premature death from cancer, as well as
Rose’s battle for her life.
At the beginning of the whole clan’s disintegration and
decline, however, Rose is very much alive, her cancer in
temporary remission. The first clue as to her scathing anger, and
the secret she is hiding, comes when Rose topples a Monopoly
board while her husband Pete is winning, saying she’s
“sick of playing.”
This is one of those stories where the narrator tells you at the
beginning, “This is how it all went wrong” as a
precedent to everything that follows. But Jane Smiley’s
skill is that at one moment, with Rose’s revelation, you
feel how everything falls apart for Ginny, and you realize that
the psychologically and environmentally toxic family environment
you’ve been immersed in as a spectator, a reader, is darker
and more twisted than you first imagined. Along with Ginny you
see all of the characters in a new light, their motivations a
panoply of vice: selfishness, greed, cruelty, deception, and
betrayal. Even Ginny-who you try to forgive for her attraction to
Jess because you know she will pay for it-slowly becomes
unrecognizably corrupted by her hatred for her own sister, acting
with such vengeance that she is no longer a sympathetic
character.
What is Rose’s secret? Will Ginny succumb to her illicit
passion, and if so, will her marriage to Ty survive? How do Larry
and Harold become allies in an intergenerational war, and at what
cost?
I would tell you, but I don’t want to spoil the
secret.
Footnote: The novel “A Thousand Acres” is often
compared to Shakespeare’s “King Lear” and is
built as a deconstruction and inversion of the Classical plot.
“A Thousand Acres” was also a movie of the same title
in 1997, starring Jessica Lange, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jason
Robards, and Colin Firth.