Word: smileyness
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Novelist Jane Smiley won the fiction award for A Thousand Acres, a heartrending Americanization of King Lear in which a prosperous Iowa farmer divides his land among three daughters. Fortunate Son: The Healing of a Vietnam Vet by Lewis B. Puller Jr. was cited in the biography category. Puller, whose late father "Chesty" was America's most decorated Marine, lost both his legs while serving as a lieutenant in Vietnam. The son's memoir provides unsparing commentary on how the nation has survived the agonies and complexities of that bitter conflict...
...THOUSAND ACRES by Jane Smiley (Knopf; $23). Based on a family feud over inherited farmland in Iowa, this modern-day King Lear has an exhilarating sense of place and a sheer Americanness that give it its own soul and roots...
...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...
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...