A Thousand Acres (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Jane Smiley
- First Published: 1991
- Type of Work: Novel
- Time of Work: 1979
- Setting: Northwest Iowa
- Principal Characters: Larry Cook, Virginia (Ginny) Cook Smith, Tyler (Ty) Smith, Rose Cook Lewis, Pete Lewis, Caroline Cook, Harold Clark, Loren Clark, Jessie (Jess) Clark
- Genres: Long fiction, Domestic realism, Family literature
- Subjects: 1970’s, Family or family life, Parents and children, Suicide, Blindness or blind persons, Midwest, 1980’s, Child abuse, Incest, Cancer, Farms, farmers, or farming, Fathers, Adultery, Sisters, Accidents, Tragedy, Heroes or heroism, Environment or environmental health, Draft, military, Poisons or poisoning, Shakespeare, William, or Shakespearean plays
- Locales: Iowa
In Ordinary Love and Good Will (1989), a collection of two novellas, Jane Smiley presents portraits of men who look very different to their wives than they do to the world at large. Each man is admired by the world for his success, as a physician or as a farmer, but his wife knows him as an egomaniac whose family members, like his pets and all his other possessions, are, to his mind, parts of his own body. In A Thousand Acres, Smiley presents another such portrait in a long, rich novel that reverberates at a mythic level in its connections with William Shakespeare’s...
[The entire page is 2627 words long]
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