King Lear on an Iowa Farm

The moral tragedy of modern agriculture is so profound that reason alone may not fathom it. Jane Smiley has grasped mythic dimensions of this crisis in her novel A Thousand Acres, which was recently awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

The beauty of her prose makes this book hard to put down, yet the ever-deepening tragedy of the story makes it a book hard to hold. Her prize has been earned. Readers will be seared, enlightened, and - for this is epic tragedy - ennobled by their experience with Smiley's story.

This is the tale of King Lear, told from the point of view of one of the "ungrateful" daughters. An exemplary Iowa farmer, who has amassed a thousand acres of America's richest land, suddenly announces his intention to retire and bequeath this holding to his three daughters. The tragedy that ensues engulfs neighbors, community, and church (the latter a social center but a moral irrelevancy). Shakespeare's story is transformed by a new location and particularly by a new perspective, that of a daughter who accepts her inheritance with misgivings in order to accommodate the ambitions of her husband and her sister.

This is a story of hard work. The farmer and his predecessors had taken rich but swampy acres and, over a quarter century, labored to lay tiles below the surface to drain the soil for farming. "However much these acres looked like a gift of nature, or of God, they were not. We went to church to pay our respects, not to give thanks."

It is a story of deep roots. "To imagine ourselves living together somewhere else...was to imagine that we were not ourselves,...since what we had for each other seemed to grow out of our entwined history and to be specific to this place."

It is a story of desire for land, rooted in the labor of ancestors, inflamed by huge equipment and efficient chemicals that induce farmers to covet adjoining lands at the expense of their neighbors.

A Thousand Acres is a mythic story of patriarchy: how rule over land re-inforces rule over family, and how unfettered authority leads to abuse of lands, wives, and daughters. The protagonist, who slowly recovers memories of physical abuse and sexual molestation by her father, cries out, "Do I think Daddy came up with beating and f------ on his own?...No, I think he had lessons, and those lessons were part of the package, along with the land and the lust to run things exactly the way he wanted to no matter what, poisoning the water and destroying the topsoil and buying bigger machinery, and then feeling certain all of it was 'right'."

And this is a story of the complexities of revenge: how the sense of grievance, once acted upon, spreads like cancer through family and community, feeding upon itself, tainting even the innocent. The women, while justly aggrieved, are each corrupted by their desires for revenge. On the final page, the protagonist confesses to "a riddle I haven't solved, of how we judge those who have hurt us when they have shown no remorse or even understanding."

Shakespeare's King Lear was a tragic hero of wounded patriarchy. Smiley's farmer is tragic, but no hero. If there is a hero in this profoundly realistic novel, it is the land that suffers continual abuse and the waters that percolate beneath its surface. These slow-moving waters take their revenge upon the family that farms without respect for the mystery and integrity of the Earth, and without giving thanks.

Richard Cartwright Austin was an environmental theologian with Appalachian Ministries Educational Resource Center and farmed with workhorses in the mountains of Virginia when this review appeared.

A Thousand Acres.  By Jane Smiley. Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. $23 (cloth).