TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/111191/1111471.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6KB | 116 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 92

The Case for Goneril and Regan


In a powerful novel, Jane Smiley goes farming to find some home
truths

By MARTHA DUFFY


    Larry Cook owns 1,000 acres of rich soil in Iowa. He is
a tough, autocratic man, well suited to his unforgiving job, "a
man willing to work all the time who's trained his children to
work the same way." The Cook place is a model modern
establishment with all the signs of a good farm: "clean fields,
neatly painted buildings, breakfast at six, no debts, no
standing water." Life is a round of chores -- the endless
regimen of meals, the canning frenzies, the tireless pursuit of
new and fancier equipment.

    One day, without warning, Larry decides to turn the
property over to his daughters -- Ginny, Rose and Caroline --
and their husbands. If any of this reminds you of King Lear,
read on. At the beginning the Cooks seem invulnerable. Only
Caroline's defection to Des Moines and marriage to a non-farmer
slightly disturb their cohesiveness. But by the end, the father
has gone mad, the farm has been lost, the family splintered.

    It is a tribute to Jane Smiley's absorbing, well-plotted
novel that it never reads like a gloss on Shakespeare. For one
thing, A Thousand Acres has an exact and exhilarating sense of
place, a sheer Americanness that gives it its own soul and
roots. More important, Ginny and Rose are not villains. Smiley
has had Lear at the back of her mind since she first read the
play. "I never bought the conventional interpretation that
Goneril and Regan were completely evil," she says.
"Unconsciously at first, I had reservations: this is not the
whole story."

    Seeing Akira Kurosawa's Ran, also based on Lear, provided
the missing link. In the film the daughters are sons, and one
of them tells the old man that his children are what he made
them. Smiley began reading commentaries about the play,
especially by feminists, and was miffed to find that even the
most radical rejected Shakespeare's terrible twosome: "A remark
condemning Goneril and Regan was de rigueur."

    Ginny and Rose, in their 30s, make a wonderful double
portrait of sisters who love and understand each other. A reader
could sit around their kitchen table for hours. They are not
plotters but increasingly angry victims, and their rage makes
them blind. Ginny has had five miscarriages, with no surviving
children. Rose has had a mastectomy. Both fall in love with Jess
Clark, a local boy who arrives back in town after 13 years well
informed about environmental woes. Not only the sisters but also
the father and his friend Harold fall victim to the poisoned
land. Blinded by anhydrous ammonia, Harold and his fate "got in
everywhere, into the solidest relationships, the firmest
beliefs, the strongest loyalties, the most deeply held
convictions you had about the people you had known most of your
life."

    Though she has never lived on a working farm, Smiley, 42,
has roots in rural country. She once asked her grandmother what
it was like on the family's Idaho ranch; the old woman replied,
"I don't remember -- I was too busy cooking." Smiley, who
teaches at Iowa State University, is a believer in the radical
agriculture movement. But she sees an inescapable link between
the exploitation of land and that of women, and here she parts
company with farm reformers like Wendell Berry as well as
nostalgia buffs who yearn for the smaller-scaled, prechemical
days.

    "Women, just like nature or the land, have been seen as
something to be used," says Smiley. "Feminists insist that women
have intrinsic value, just as environmentalists believe that
nature has its own worth, independent of its use to man." In A
Thousand Acres, men's dominance of women takes a violent turn,
and incest becomes an undercurrent in the novel. The implication
is that the impulse to incest concerns not so much sex as a will
to power, an expression of yet another way the woman serves the
man.

    Having finished her most ambitious work (she has written
four earlier novels and several shorter works), Smiley is about
to embark on that rite of passage in publishing, the author
promotional tour. Costing at least $2,000 a city, such efforts
are not cheap for a publisher and can be a gamble, especially
when -- as in Smiley's case -- the writer's name is more
literary than commercial. So you wonder: Does Alfred A. Knopf
know that its new star has just bought 25 copies of a Free Press
book, Broken Heartland, by radical agriculturist Osha Gray
Davidson, just so she can give them away to people who are
interested in the perils of pesticides? Customers will have to
pay $23 for her book; Davidson's is free.

    When a novel comes even close to being a tract, its beauty
and entertainment value are shrunken. The magic of A Thousand
Acres is that it deals so effectively with both the author's
scholarship and her dead-serious social concerns in an
engrossing piece of fiction. We are accustomed to learning the
political concerns of 19th century novelists through their
books. Smiley represents a hopeful sign that feminists and
environmentalists are finding imaginative ways to express their
convictions. But don't look for more of the same from Smiley
anytime soon. She is now teaching a course on 1980s comic
fiction, and her next book will be -- guess what -- a satirical
novel.