Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Smiley's novel of family life on an Iowa farm is a retelling of Shakespeare's King Lear, about a father and his three daughters. When Larry Cook, the aging patriarch of a rich, thriving farm in Iowa, decides to retire, he offers his land to his daughters. For Ginny and Rose, who live on the farm with their husbands, the gift makes sense — a reward for years of hard work, a challenge to make the farm even more successful. But the youngest, Caroline, a Des Moines lawyer, flatly rejects the idea, and in anger her father cuts her out — setting off an explosive series of events that will leave none of them unchanged. A classic story of contemporary American life, A Thousand Acres strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a father, a daughter, a family.
In 1956, toward the end of the Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition. Ames's grandfather "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father -- an ardent pacifist -- and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son. Gilead won both the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.__________
Sept. 21, 2007 ~ Jill has a review of this book on her blog.
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