“A Thousand Acres” by Jane Smiley (post 3): To what extent are novelists authoritative in regard to their own novels?

Even though A Thousand Acres won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was made into a movie, Jane Smiley didn’t much like it “either while writing it, or even when finished, in part because King Lear as a literary point of reference meant that ‘I was writing to it rather than it coming from me’…Smiley also recalled that ‘sustaining the ‘I’ point of view was very tedious. At one point I thought, If I have to write one more sentence that starts with ‘I’ I’ll kill myself!’ ” (1, p. 173-174).

Jane Smiley apparently intended her novel to be a corrective to Shakespeare’s King Lear by telling the story from the daughters’ point of view. She would explain that their hostility toward their father was due to his committing incest with them in their childhood.

As the title of the novel highlights, their father’s farm of a thousand acres was monumentally successful. But when he loses control of the farm to his daughters and their husbands, it goes bankrupt.

Did Smiley intend her novel to teach the lesson that great things are accomplished and maintained only by child-abusing patriarchs? No. Of course not. She had somehow lost control.

A Thousand Acres illustrates that novelists are not as in control of what they write as many readers assume. For various reasons, including multiple personality, they do not control, and do not understand, every word.

1. Neil Nakadate. Understanding Jane Smiley. Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 1999.