A Thousand Acres is a 1991 novel by Jane Smiley.
The setting is rural Iowa in 1979. The story is centered around the Cook family: patriarch Larry Cook, his daughter Ginny (who narrates), Ginny's husband Ty Smith, Larry's second daughter Rose, Rose's husband Pete Lewis, and Larry's youngest daughter Caroline, who is unmarried. Larry is the biggest landholder in the region, owning the eponymous thousand-acre farm. Larry is also a mean, nasty Jerkass, who demands that Ginny and Rose wait on him hand and foot. While Ty and Pete work the family's farm along with Larry, Caroline broke free of farm life, and works as a lawyer in the big city.
More or less out of nowhere, Larry gets a bright idea. He will incorporate the farm, and sign control over to his three daughters. Ginny and Rose and their husbands are perfectly willing to sign the deal, but when Caroline expresses reluctance Larry angrily excludes her, literally shutting the door in her face. With Caroline shut out, the Smiths and the Lewises take control of the farm...but soon Larry Cook becomes less content with his reduced status and loss of control. Another destabilizing event is the arrival of Jess Clark, prodigal son of the neighboring Clark family, who soon begins to have romantic tension with both Clark sisters. Meanwhile, the Smiths and the Lewises start to turn on each other, and Larry starts to lose his mind, one night wandering out in a storm. Eventually, Caroline intercedes.
Does any of this sound familiar? It should, because it's actually King Lear...IN IOWA!.
Compare Fool, another Perspective Flip on King Lear in novel form, this time taking place in Shakespeare's actual story but from the perspective of the Fool.
The Film of the Book was released in 1997 with Jason Robards as Larry, and Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange and Jennifer Jason Leigh as Rose, Ginny and Caroline respectively. (Also, Colin Firth, Michelle Williams and Elisabeth Moss appear in supporting roles.)
Tropes:
- Abdicate the Throne: Larry Clark's decision to incorporate the farm and leave it to his daughters unleashes all the tragedy to follow.
- Abusive Parents: Eventually it's revealed that both Rose and Ginny were repeatedly raped by their father after their mother died when they were teenagers. Rose is filled with rage at her father, while Ginny has repressed all memories of her trauma and at first does not believe Rose.
- Adaptational Heroism: In King Lear Regan and Goneril are evil schemers. This novel is a feminist retelling of the story, so Rose and Ginny are much more sympathetic. Rose is a cancer survivor while Ginny has had five miscarriages, which are eventually revealed to have been caused by the water everyone drinks, which is poisoned by farming chemicals. Both were physically beaten and also raped by their father. Both also have disappointing husbands; Pete is a drunk who hit Rose in the past (although he has reformed) while Ty is harmless but ultimately doesn't support his wife. As a result both sisters are far, far more sympathetic than their counterparts in the play.
- Adaptational Villainy
- This being a feminist retelling of King Lear, the Lear character is not just a foolish old king brought down by his own hubris. Instead he's a monstrous sociopath who beat and raped his two older daughters and deserves everything he gets.
- A knock-on effect of making Lear/Larry much more villainous is that Cordelia/Caroline is not the saint that she is in the play. Although Ginny and Rose sacrificed so that Caroline could escape the farm and make something of herself, she isn't very grateful to her older sisters, mostly because she does not know about the sexual abuse. Also, making Ginny and Rose the protagonists makes Caroline more of an antagonist when she returns to help her father, in this story by filing suit with her father against the two older daughters.
- Adaptation Name Change: All the characters. Lear, Regan, Goneril, and Cordelia become Larry, Rose, Ginny, and Caroline.
- All Abusers Are Male: This novel imagines the Lear analogue as an abusive patriarch who has sexually abused his two eldest daughters. Let it be noted that Lear in the play was a senile old man who had been implied to be a respected and benevolent ruler in his youth, and the novel serves to 'justify' the two daughters' wicked deeds by giving them abusive backgrounds.
- The Bard on Board: King Lear adapted to the late 20th century and set on an Iowa farm.
- Cloudcuckoolander: Marv Carson, the guy from the bank. He's roughly analogous to the Fool from Lear. He has all kinds of crackpot health nut ideas about purging toxins and eating the right kind of cheese but not the wrong kind, and he has to have a spoonful of sugar exactly at noon. Like the Fool, Marv is also implied to be more clever than he appears; it's hinted that Marv has subtly manipulated events to get the Smiths and Lewises into debt so that the bank can take the farm.
- Cobweb of Disuse: When Ginny goes into her deceased sister's basement to retrieve the poisoned sauerkraut, the basement is covered in cobwebs. It's creepy but also sad in that Rose is dead and everything's been destroyed.
- Demoted to Extra: A feminist retelling of King Lear means there can't be any sympathetic men. So while in the play Edgar is the hero—helping his father, fighting Edmund, nearly rescuing Cordelia and Lear—his book counterpart, Jess Clark's older brother Loren, hardly affects the story at all.
- Distant Finale: A time skip of "several years" introduces the finale, in which Rose dies of cancer and Ginny and Caroline, now permanently estranged, sell off the farm. Later there's a reference to three years having gone by.
- Downer Ending: Not the soul-crushing tragedy of the play but still a downer. Rose dies after her cancer recurs. Ginny winds up alone, divorced, estranged from her surviving sister, working as a waitress and in debt to the IRS. The farm, which the Smiths and Lewises bankrupted, is sold off.
- Down on the Farm: A farm in 1979 Iowa is the setting for King Lear. The patriarchy and provincial attitudes of rural farm country is important to the story; near the end Ginny says that Larry beat and raped his daughters because everything about the world he grew up in said that that was ok.
- Draft Dodging: Jess Clark, who is a forward-thinking hippie type as opposed to the Iowa farm folk he grew up with, ran off to Canada after basic training in the Army, rather than serve in Vietnam. He has just returned after thirteen years away, Carter having pardoned all the Vietnam draft dodgers.
- Driven to Suicide: Pete Lewis kills himself, driving his truck into the lake, after finding out that Rose was cheating on him with Jess Clark.
- Eye Scream: Another plot point taken from King Lear. Harold Clark, the Gloucester character, is blinded by an accident with anhydrous ammonia, an accident that Pete had facilitated by draining the water from Harold's water tank.
- Foreshadowing:
- Ginny remembers how she was greatly disturbed to see Caroline, as a child, giving her father a kiss. This foreshadows the reveal later in the book that Ginny and Rose were raped by their father.
- A scene is set at the local quarry, which is long abandoned and now filled in as an artificial lake with dark, murky water. Pete kills himself by driving his truck into the quarry.
- In the early part of the novel, the Smiths, Lewises, and Jess Clark get together and play Monopoly. The things that happen in the game—greed, acquisitiveness, players getting overleveraged and running out of cash—foreshadow what happens to the farm later.
- Green Aesop: The water that the farmers drink is tainted by all sorts of poisons, the pesticides and fertilizers and other chemicals that get dumped on the crops. Jess believes that this is what caused Ginny's five miscarriages, and it's implied that the poisoned well water is also what caused Rose's cancer. The poisoned water is also symbolic of the lies and abuse that have poisoned the superficially placid relations between the main characters.
- Honor Thy Parent: Like King Lear this is a major theme, but unlike the play, this feminist retelling holds that Larry's daughters have honored their parent too much. Even after years of abuse, physical and sexual, Rose and Ginny are content to serve their father still, cooking his meals and doing his laundry.
- Murder the Hypotenuse: After Ginny finds out that Jess Clark left her for her sister Rose, she attempts to murder Rose by giving her a jar of homemade sauerkraut laced with hemlock. Rose never eats it.
- Parental Incest: Larry Cook repeatedly raped both of his older daughters after his wife died.
- Perspective Flip: The novel tells King Lear solely through the perspective of Ginny, the eldest Cook daughter. It's an explicitly feminist retelling in which the two older daughters are more sympathetic, the father is far more monstrous, and all the other men are generally weak and useless.
- Posthumous Character: Larry's wife and the three sisters' mother, dead some 20 years when the story begins. While she meant well, "Mommy" was beaten down (emotionally at least) by and submissive to her monstrous husband, and failed to protect her daughters. Her mother's old friend Mary Livingstone tells Ginny that Mrs. Cook wanted Rose and Ginny to go elsewhere after she died.
- Promotion to Parent: In the backstory, Ginny and Rose were tasked with taking care of five-year-old Caroline when their mother died, despite themselves being in their early- to mid-teens, because their awful patriarchal asshole of a father wouldn't lift a finger to take care of his child or the home.
- Scatterbrained Senior: King Lear goes mad after he gives up his power. Larry Clark rapidly descends into dementia, first doing weird stuff like buying expensive furniture and leaving it outside in the rain, then screaming obscenities at his daughters before wandering off into a storm (like Lear). By the time of the lawsuit, just a few months later, he's unable to recognize Caroline.
- Setting Update: King Lear is updated from ancient pagan Britain to late 1970s Iowa.
- Sibling Triangle: In another plot point taken from King Lear, both Ginny and Rose have affairs with Jess Clark while they are both married.
- Spared by the Adaptation: While King Lear ends with the crushing tragedy of Cordelia's death, executed by Edmund, in this novel Caroline lives to sell off the farm along with Ginny.
- Title Drop: There are multiple references to the "thousand acres" that represent Larry Clark's kingdom, Larry having spent much of his life buying out neighboring farmers, sometimes by underhanded means.
- Trauma-Induced Amnesia: Rose is surprised to learn that Ginny has no recollection of being sexually abused by their father. Her memory comes back when she is packing belongings for him and overwhelms her.
- Unreliable Narrator: Caroline accuses Ginny of being greedy and wanting their father's land, and says that Ginny wouldn't have signed the deal if she didn't want to. Ginny meanwhile has been telling the reader that it was all her father's idea and she only signed it to go along. It's subtly hinted that Ginny isn't being honest about her own motivations.
- Whole-Plot Reference: King Lear transplanted to Iowa, with an imperious patriarch deciding to divide his "kingdom"—that is, a good-sized farm—among his three daughters.
- Youngest Child Wins: While Rose and Ginny wound up stuck in unfulfilling marriages, suffering through the drudgery and misogyny of rural farm life, Caroline made it out and became a lawyer. The older sisters resent Caroline for not appreciating the sacrifices they made for her.
