It was "King Lear" set on a farm in Iowa

The year was 1997, and Mama brought home A Thousand Acres for us to watch on a Saturday night. It could have been a Friday night, but that doesn't really matter. I don't remember much about the movie, I was only 14 or so at the time, and I can't say that a movie about two sisters fighting over a farm was that appealing.

What I do remember, however, did not prepare me for the book. It seems that they utilized that creative license to the fullest extent... by basically rewriting it all together. But it could just be my memory.

After all, how could I have forgotten that this beautiful fellow played Jess Clark?
Perhaps I blocked this from my memory, as I preferred to remember him as Mr. Darcy. No girl would daydream about one day meeting a Jess Clark, but he is a much better image than what I came up with on my own.

Forgive me. I digress.

A Thousand Acres won Jane Smiley the Pulitzer in 1992 and is, in fact, King Lear set on a farm in Iowa. Ever book review I have read started out that way, and this brief description was utilized as the summary for the movie. However, I would prefer to talk about the work in its own right.

There was something about Smiley's beautiful prose and Ginny's narrative that pulled me in and made me feel at home. Both sets of grandparents were farmers in one way or another, and there is a certain kind of hardness that comes with the profession. One cannot wallow in tragedy; one cannot simply take a day off because you are tired. The cows will still need milking, and the fields will still need tending. The land doesn't take a holiday, and it can be just as callous as hard working hands.

The storyline is simple. The father, Larry Cook, has decided that the time has come to turn his thousand-acre farm into a corporation that would then go to his three daughters. Ginny, the oldest, simply does as she is told. That's what she has pretty much always done. Rose, the middle daughter, has no problem taking the farm as she feels it is her right, and Caroline, the youngest and a lawyer in the big city, has no interest in the land. Family secrets and forgotten memories are brought to light as the father slowly slips into senility, and the sisters and spouses are at constant odds.

While there is much more going on in this quiet novel, what stuck with me was the father's preoccupation with growing and subduing the land for family and prestige, and in the end, not only is the farm lost, divided up and sold to the highest bidder, but the family is destroyed. Smiley creates a realistic world in where there are no perfect specimens of the human race. Each sister, husband, father, neighbor has their own faults, their own baggage, and their own motives that drive them to the devastating end.

For dirt and water.

For stubbornness and envy.

For the Cooks, blood didn't run that thick after all.

While A Thousand Acres is, in fact, King Lear set on a farm, it is so much more than that. Smiley took a classic story and modernized and twisted it to the American culture, our passions and desires, for better or for worse.

Over the next few months, I will have to deviate from my Pulitzer quest. I will instead read other American greats such as Emerson, Melville, and Alcott among others. In stolen moments of spare time, I plan to read Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor (1956). However, it may be Christmas before that is accomplished.

Until then, dear readers.... Happy reading.