What lurks beneath the surface? This question rears up in every chapter of A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley’s searing reimagining of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Updated to 1979 and moved to a thousand-acre farm in northern Iowa, the story starts with Larry, the family patriarch and a king among the farmers in Zebulon County, abruptly deciding to divide his land among his three daughters. Just as Cordelia did in the original play, the youngest daughter, Caroline, expresses doubt about the wisdom of this move and is summarily disinherited. Left to manage the farm are our narrator Ginny and her sister Rose, along with their husbands, the dutiful and hardworking Ty and the onetime musician turned reluctant farmer Pete.
Smiley’s writing brilliantly captures the beauty of the tranquil landscape and the stoic nature of the farmers who tend it. “A thousand acres. It was that simple….But if I look past the buzzing machine monotonously unzipping the crusted soil, at the field itself and the fields around it, I remember that the seemingly stationary fields are always flowing toward one farmer and away from another. The lesson my father might say they prove is that a man gets what he deserves by creating his own good luck.”
This is a familiar backdrop to our group of readers. We see the rolling fields of corn and neatly planted rows of soy beans Smiley describes daily as we drive even a few minutes outside the city. As the story unfolds, however, we become aware of the poison flowing through the fertile soil. Smiley describes monoculture, use of pesticides and artificial fertilizers, the practice of planting to the very edge of fields with no borders to capture and filter toxic runoff, and large hog confinements – all standard farming practices today that were just starting to appear in 1979.
And just like the land they tend, the stoic, upstanding members of the Cook family hide the poison that flows under the surface of their family dynamic. Bit by bit, Smiley pulls back the facades that hide the true nature of their relationships and interactions over the years, which are yet more toxic than the pesticides and fertilizers that form the foundation of their livelihood.
Just as Shakespeare did in King Lear, Smiley introduces side characters who complicate established relationships and drive the plot forward to its tragic end. Unlike Shakespeare, however, she gives sisters Ginny and Rose a voice and a backstory that make us wonder whether Lear’s coldhearted Goneril and scheming Regan might have had motivations we never saw. Smiley ultimately leaves us with a blistering family portrait and their beautifully-narrated, heartbreaking inability to avoid their own tragic demise.
— Marcy Luft and Jeanie Smith
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