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Lear in Iowa
| Article
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20108 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1992 |
2,279 Words |
| Author
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Linda Simon
Linda Simon is professor of literature at Skidmore College
and a frequent contributor to The World & I. |
A THOUSAND ACRES
Jane Smiley
New York: Knopf, 1991
352 pp., $23.00
Our enduring veneration for King Lear comes partly from Shakespeare's gifts as a writer, partly from the archetypal quality of the tale itself. Shakespeare did not invent the story of a father's tragic testing of his daughters' love. Scholars believe the legend originated in Celtic mythology, first appearing in print in the twelfth century. Five hundred years later, when Shakespeare took the theme as his own, Lear's trials long had been recounted in popular folk tales.
Shakespeare complicated the plot to suit his sixteenth-century audience and created a text that generations of readers have interpreted in their own way. King Lear has been seen as a Christian allegory, as an examination of humanity's struggle with the forces of nature, as a questioning of the meaning and sources of justice.
Now Jane Smiley, the talented fiction writer whose books include The Age of Grief, The Greenlanders, and Ordinary Love & Good Will, has translated the story Lear for our own times, reincarnating Lear as Larry Cook, a prosperous Iowa farmer and Gonerial as Ginny, his eldest daughters. Smiley allows us to see Cook through Ginny's eyes: How, Smiley asks, can a daughter help us top understands the power of a father within his family? How can she help us a to understand the relationship of human beings to the natural world?
Ginny, thirty-six when the novel opens, is married to the hard-working, sensible Ty; she is childless after five miscarriages; and she dutifully helps her sisters care for the father she has always feared. Ginny venerates the idea of family more than her sister Rose and Caroline. Rose, cynical, independent, and quick-tempered, is fiercely protective of her own two daughters, but impatient and often disrespectful will her domineering father. Caroline, the youngest, raised by Ginny and Rose after their mother died, extricated herself from the family to become a lawyer in Des Moines. Although she returns at regular intervals to take her turn at caring for her father, she is otherwise estranged from farm life, and from the family's life as well.
Smiley chose well in having Ginny narrate the family's story. Ginny lacks Rose's suspicious nature, but rather looks at acts squarely, slow to decisions, slower still to rash
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