A Thousand Acres

In her major new novel, Jane Smiley takes us into the world of a thriving Iowa farm: one thousand acres- unencumbered, unmortgaged of the richest, flattest, most arable land on earth.

The time is 1979. Larry Cook, a proud and exacting farmer, whose family has lived on this land for four generations, unexpectedly decides to retire and turn over his valuable holdings to his three daughters. For Ginny, the courteous and accommodating eldest daughter, and Rose, her more caustic and determined sister, this gift seems like a just reward for years of hard work. But Caroline, the youngest, who is a lawyer in Des Moines, thinks it is a bad idea, and in anger her father cuts her out. As Ginny and Rose and their husbands fall eagerly to the task of making their new venture a success expanding the hog-raising operation, building a new barn, taking on debt for the first time they begin to see a bizarre change in their father. Suddenly he takes to driving for endless, aimless miles around the countryside or sits silently in his armchair watching the cornfield. As Rose says, "Perfecting that death's-head stare will be his lifework from now on." Though Ginny believes that her father's impulse was sensible and right ("if not for him, then for us"), she cannot shake her uneasiness about him. In time, it becomes clear that the transfer of land is the first in an unfolding of events that will dismember the farm, that will part father from daughters, sister from sister, husband from wife.

This is the story that Ginny tells, as she looks back into the past for some clue to what is happening to them. What she finds there will allow no forgiveness, only the unraveling of a world she thought permanent, solid, and secure, and the unmasking of a man who has always epitomized for her the concepts of father and farmer.

The forces that bound Lear and his daughters reverberate beneath the surface of Jane Smiley's extraordinary novel, the most powerfully dramatic work we have had yet from the author of Ordinary Love & Good Will, The Greenlander, and The Age of Grief.