The Case for Goneril and Regan

By Martha Duffy

Larry Cook owns 1,000 acres of rich soil in Iowa. He is a tough, autocratic man, well suited to his unforgiving job, "a man willing to work all the time who's trained his children to work the same way." The Cook place is a model modern establishment with all the signs of a good farm: "clean fields, neatly painted buildings, breakfast at six, no debts, no standing water." Life is a round of chores -- the endless regimen of meals, the canning frenzies, the tireless pursuit of new and fancier equipment.

One day, without warning, Larry decides to turn the property over to his daughters -- Ginny, Rose and Caroline -- and their husbands. If any of this reminds you of King Lear, read on. At the beginning the Cooks seem invulnerable. Only Caroline's defection to Des Moines and marriage to a non- farmer slightly disturb their cohesiveness. But by the end, the father has gone mad, the farm has been lost, the family splintered.

It is a tribute to Jane Smiley's absorbing, well-plotted novel that it never reads like a gloss on Shakespeare. For one thing, A Thousand Acres has an exact and exhilarating sense of place, a sheer Americanness that gives it its own soul and roots. More important, Ginny and Rose are not villains. Smiley has had Lear at the back of her mind since she first read the play. "I never bought the conventional interpretation that Goneril and Regan were completely evil," she says. "Unconsciously at first, I had reservations: this is not the whole story."

| Seeing Akira Kurosawa's Ran, also based on Lear, provided the missing link. In the film the daughters are sons, and one of them tells the old man that his children are what he made them. Smiley began reading commentaries about the play, especially by feminists, and was miffed to find that even the most radical rejected Shakespeare's terrible twosome: "A remark condemning Goneril and Regan was de rigueur."

Ginny and Rose, in their 30s, make a wonderful double portrait of sisters who love and understand each other. A reader could sit around their kitchen table for hours. They are not plotters but increasingly angry victims, and their rage makes them blind. Ginny has had five miscarriages, with no surviving children. Rose has had a mastectomy. Both fall in love with Jess Clark, a local boy who arrives back in town after 13 years well informed about environmental woes. Not only the sisters but also the father and his friend Harold fall victim to the poisoned land. Blinded by anhydrous ammonia, Harold and his fate "got in everywhere, into the solidest relationships, the firmest beliefs, the strongest loyalties, the most deeply held convictions you had about the people you had known most of your life."

Though she has never lived on a working farm, Smiley, 42, has roots in rural country. She once asked her grandmother what it was like on the family's Idaho ranch; the old woman replied, "I don't remember -- I was too busy cooking." Smiley, who teaches at Iowa State University, is a believer in the radical agriculture movement. But she sees an inescapable link between the exploitation of land and that of women, and here she parts company with farm reformers like Wendell Berry as well as nostalgia buffs who yearn for the smaller-scaled, prechemical days.

"Women, just like nature or the land, have been seen as something to be used," says Smiley. "Feminists insist that women have intrinsic value, just as environmentalists believe that nature has its own worth, independent of its use to man." In A Thousand Acres, men's dominance of women takes a violent turn, and incest becomes an undercurrent in the novel. The implication is that the impulse to incest concerns not so much sex as a will to power, an expression of yet another way the woman serves the man.

Having finished her most ambitious work (she has written four earlier novels and several shorter works), Smiley is about to embark on that rite of passage in publishing, the author promotional tour. Costing at least $2,000 a city, such efforts are not cheap for a publisher and can be a gamble, especially when -- as in Smiley's case -- the writer's name is more literary than commercial. So you wonder: Does Alfred A. Knopf know that its new star has just bought 25 copies of a Free Press book, Broken Heartland, by radical agriculturist Osha Gray Davidson, just so she can give them away to people who are interested in the perils of pesticides? Customers will have to pay $23 for her book; Davidson's is free.

When a novel comes even close to being a tract, its beauty and entertainment value are shrunken. The magic of A Thousand Acres is that it deals so effectively with both the author's scholarship and her dead-serious social concerns in an engrossing piece of fiction. We are accustomed to learning the political concerns of 19th century novelists through their books. Smiley represents a hopeful sign that feminists and environmentalists are finding imaginative ways to express their convictions. But don't look for more of the same from Smiley anytime soon. She is now teaching a course on 1980s comic fiction, and her next book will be -- guess what -- a satirical novel.