The Missouri Review: An Interview With Jane Smiley by Kay Bonetti.Winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award doesn't really exist, really (Elisabeth Sherwin) The Adventures of Jane Smiley (The Atlantic) Take a wild ride with Jane Smiley's spirited new heroine (ELLEN Place] A Thousand Acres (includes link to King Lear) Or could this be the beginning of a beautiful friendship? (JaneĪ Thousand Acres By Jane Smiley (CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT, NY Times)

Marriage doomed in the 21st century, asks leading American writer Jane I tossed it': The Pulitzer winner on her love of Trollope, her passion for cooking and the Ian McEwan novel she feels is overrated (Jane Smiley, 2/05/21, The Guardian)Ģ1st century family values: Infidelity, divorce, stepchildren. SELF INTERVIEW: Jane Smiley: 'I couldn't finish Philip Roth's American Pastoral. Vintage Books List of the Best Reading Group Books Political elements and the unsympathetic characters, there's just too much Pilfered a great, time tested plot and we're swept along by simple curiosityĪt how boldly she's going to borrow from it. You're going to imitate someone, you may as well crib from the best, she Smiley is a terrific writer and one lesson of this novel is that if Serviceable tragedy, mix in rape, incest and recovered memory and suddenlyĮvery shut-in and book club member in America will be clamoring for herĬopy. Subplot for the Oprah audience? It's like a recipe: take one perfectly Would be complete without a trendy 'women as victims, men as bastards' Is all too common these days, and actually comes close to turning the book The typical attempt to stack the moral decks, a failure of confidence that Real annoyance is the decision to work in a storyline about how the patriarch There's a feminist spin put on the story, that she can be forgiven,Īnd, predictably, the clan takes up organic farming. The other problem with the book is the mod politics of it. I am reminded of this theory because A Thousand Acres is intended to beĪn American tragedy, a reenactment of King Lear set in the nation's heartland.īut the people in the book are all just so execrable that there is nothing Is not a tragedy because the MacBeths are such awful people that theirįall is simply not tragic (Bozack was merely the referee at the game). Parents took us to, I contrasted Hamlet and MacBeth, arguing that MacBeth In this paper, written at an Islander game that Dryfoos's David's 11th grade English class called Hamlet, MacBeth andīozack. One of the select handful was a remarkably perceptiveĮssay for Mr. During my long and decidedly checkered academic career there were prettyįew bright spots.

A thousand acres by jane smiley