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A review by gregbrown
A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
5.0
Families are prisons; hometowns less so, but still. Our relatives bind us with their expectations and demands, offering up kinship and support in return. For some, the tradeoff is more than worth it, isn't even a tradeoff at all. But for others, it can be intolerable, a social contract signed at our birth, and one we can't wait to break.
Hometowns are different, yet can be just as stifling. Instead of familial demands, there are community expectations and values. Others' opinions on you are formed far too early, when you aren't fully-formed yourself. Later, when you've changed, you're frustrated by people treating you the same way. All these tendencies are equally present in families, but changing the minds of a handful is easier than converting a hundred.
Rural living has historically suffered from both these problems, with near-homogenous communities meaning that those who stray are shamed into submission or shunned away. Even the hope of severing family ties is quashed, since you still have to see them—and their friends—on a regular basis.
This quandry animates A Thousand Acres, our protagonist Ginny coping with two people who left their community because they didn't, couldn't, belong. One is her sister Caroline, who escaped to the big city (well, Des Moines) as a lawyer, and infuriates the family by minimizing their role in her life. The other is Jess, a prodigal son of a family friend who returns a decade after dodging the draft, full of wild experiences and different ideas. Soon, she feels attracted to Jess, which puts the lie to her story about why she's frustrated with her sister. Ginny isn't angry because Caroline's trying to lead a separate life, but because she's jealous that Caroline realized a dream she could never have.
That's how the grievances start, and how I thought the book would play out while reading the first 150 pages. And then, for lack of a better term, shit gets crazy. The tension built up in the first half of the book begins to explode into shocking violence, and in the hands of any lesser writer, it would seem almost stapled on. But because Smiley handled the first half so aptly, the second half is grounded in those emotional connections, even as they're rapidly shredded and turned into shifting alliances struggling for land and power. At one point, I remarked to my wife that it was more crazy and stressful than anything in A Game of Thrones, and she agreed!
The frustrating thing about discussing this book is that so much rides on the revelations and turns of the second half, but discovering those for yourself is so important, so I don't want to spoil them. Again, any lesser novelist couldn't have handled it, would have let the events of the second half overshadow the first. But Smiley pulls it off, and to reveal her hand early is to do her a disservice. About the only hint I'm willing to give is that it's based on a Shakespeare play, and I would encourage you not to google for the truth.
Hometowns are different, yet can be just as stifling. Instead of familial demands, there are community expectations and values. Others' opinions on you are formed far too early, when you aren't fully-formed yourself. Later, when you've changed, you're frustrated by people treating you the same way. All these tendencies are equally present in families, but changing the minds of a handful is easier than converting a hundred.
Rural living has historically suffered from both these problems, with near-homogenous communities meaning that those who stray are shamed into submission or shunned away. Even the hope of severing family ties is quashed, since you still have to see them—and their friends—on a regular basis.
This quandry animates A Thousand Acres, our protagonist Ginny coping with two people who left their community because they didn't, couldn't, belong. One is her sister Caroline, who escaped to the big city (well, Des Moines) as a lawyer, and infuriates the family by minimizing their role in her life. The other is Jess, a prodigal son of a family friend who returns a decade after dodging the draft, full of wild experiences and different ideas. Soon, she feels attracted to Jess, which puts the lie to her story about why she's frustrated with her sister. Ginny isn't angry because Caroline's trying to lead a separate life, but because she's jealous that Caroline realized a dream she could never have.
That's how the grievances start, and how I thought the book would play out while reading the first 150 pages. And then, for lack of a better term, shit gets crazy. The tension built up in the first half of the book begins to explode into shocking violence, and in the hands of any lesser writer, it would seem almost stapled on. But because Smiley handled the first half so aptly, the second half is grounded in those emotional connections, even as they're rapidly shredded and turned into shifting alliances struggling for land and power. At one point, I remarked to my wife that it was more crazy and stressful than anything in A Game of Thrones, and she agreed!
The frustrating thing about discussing this book is that so much rides on the revelations and turns of the second half, but discovering those for yourself is so important, so I don't want to spoil them. Again, any lesser novelist couldn't have handled it, would have let the events of the second half overshadow the first. But Smiley pulls it off, and to reveal her hand early is to do her a disservice. About the only hint I'm willing to give is that it's based on a Shakespeare play, and I would encourage you not to google for the truth.