![]() Smiley has the skill to dramatize effectively, as readers of such earlier books of hers as twoĬollections of novellas, "The Age of Grief" (1987) and "Ordinary Love and Good Will" (1989) can attest. Part of it remains absorbed by the foreground, whose domestic details and bucolic rhythms Ms. Now of course upon reading this, the reader's mind divides. Madness and generational conflict begins. "It's as simple as that." So the farm is divided into two instead of three, with Ginny and Rose to take turns looking after Larry. "You don't want it, my girl, you're out," says Larry to Caroline. "I don't know," says the youngest, Caroline, who is a lawyer. ![]() "It's a great idea," says the second daughter, Rose. What do they think of the plan? "It'sĪ good idea," says the oldest, who is called Ginny. In 1979, the three sisters' father, Laurence (Larry) Cook, decides to form a corporation out of his farm holdings and give each of his daughters a third of it. $23.Īt the opening of Jane Smiley's latest novel, "A Thousand Acres," the narrator, a woman named Virginia Cook Smith, describes the farm in Zebulon County, Iowa, that she and her two younger sisters, Rose and Caroline, have grown up on: "Paidįor, no encumbrances, as flat and fertile, black, friable and exposed as any piece of land on the face of the earth."Īnd then comes the shock of recognition. October 31, 1991, Thursday, Late Edition - Finalīy Jane Smiley 371 pages. Books of The Times On an Iowa Farm, a Tragedy With Echoes of Lear ![]()
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