November GrauJust finished "A Thousand Acres" by Jane Smiley, another charity shop find. It's not the kind of thing I would read normally, because I tend to find Big Serious Prize books a bit of a bore. It's also a reboot of King Lear, which is my favourite Shakespeare play, and my usual position is that the literary world really needs to drop it with the endless reworkings and make up some new myths.
But in fact this book wasn't boring at all, though nowadays the decision to begin with numerous paragraphs about swamp draining tile technology might be considered a bold move! But I quite like hydraulic stuff and in any case the shock revelations soon begin to pile on, some of them real gutpunches.
And the Lear stuff isn't rammed down your throat. The story feels quite new, partly because, instead of fetishizing the Cordelia character, Smiley has the story be told by Ginny in the Goneril seat. Ginny is one of those characters who are very passive and repressed on the surface of their lives but who gradually foment a certain amount of rebellion. (Another difference from Lear is that I punched the air with glee at the blinding of "Gloucester", instead of being horrified!)
The book deals with some really horrible stuff such as incest, misogyny, domestic violence, and the ruination of human health by ecocidal farming practices. "Cordelia" is a massive twat and apart from what happens to "Gloucester" there is no comic relief whatsoever. But Smiley keeps you reading, in part by the hypnotic descriptions of Ginny and Rose's unpaid female labour in the kitchen and gardens (and to be fair, Ginny does enjoy her garden and there are many pleasing descriptions of plants and vegetables.) The first few chapters, although they reveal fault lines that grow into chasms later on, could come right out of a homesteader influencer's playbook, which of course makes the later developments even more upsetting! And there is just something about the quiet way Smiley writes that makes it hard to put the book down.
If I have one criticism it would be that sometimes the way Ginny comes to remember her repressed trauma feels a little bit by-the-numbers, a bit conveniently swift, but that's not really something that gets in the way during the read. I don't think it's the ultimate book on the topic, but it does do a really good job of showing the extent to which the most horrendous crimes can get scuffed over and just ignored, including by the victims themselves, because they happen within the family. Nor does it make saints out of the victims.
If you want a big engrossing rustic American novel that's serious without being pompous, then I would recommend this.
https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780394577739
#JaneSmiley #BookReviews
But in fact this book wasn't boring at all, though nowadays the decision to begin with numerous paragraphs about swamp draining tile technology might be considered a bold move! But I quite like hydraulic stuff and in any case the shock revelations soon begin to pile on, some of them real gutpunches.
And the Lear stuff isn't rammed down your throat. The story feels quite new, partly because, instead of fetishizing the Cordelia character, Smiley has the story be told by Ginny in the Goneril seat. Ginny is one of those characters who are very passive and repressed on the surface of their lives but who gradually foment a certain amount of rebellion. (Another difference from Lear is that I punched the air with glee at the blinding of "Gloucester", instead of being horrified!)
The book deals with some really horrible stuff such as incest, misogyny, domestic violence, and the ruination of human health by ecocidal farming practices. "Cordelia" is a massive twat and apart from what happens to "Gloucester" there is no comic relief whatsoever. But Smiley keeps you reading, in part by the hypnotic descriptions of Ginny and Rose's unpaid female labour in the kitchen and gardens (and to be fair, Ginny does enjoy her garden and there are many pleasing descriptions of plants and vegetables.) The first few chapters, although they reveal fault lines that grow into chasms later on, could come right out of a homesteader influencer's playbook, which of course makes the later developments even more upsetting! And there is just something about the quiet way Smiley writes that makes it hard to put the book down.
If I have one criticism it would be that sometimes the way Ginny comes to remember her repressed trauma feels a little bit by-the-numbers, a bit conveniently swift, but that's not really something that gets in the way during the read. I don't think it's the ultimate book on the topic, but it does do a really good job of showing the extent to which the most horrendous crimes can get scuffed over and just ignored, including by the victims themselves, because they happen within the family. Nor does it make saints out of the victims.
If you want a big engrossing rustic American novel that's serious without being pompous, then I would recommend this.
https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780394577739
#JaneSmiley #BookReviews
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