A Thousand Acres
By Jane Smiley. Winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, this American tragedy recasts the story of King Lear on an Iowa farm in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. When a tyrannical but enfeebled patriarch divides his farm unequally among his three daughters, their prosperous, provincial world is torn apart by long-simmering rivalries and recovered memories of incest. Not only does Smiley nail the dynamics of a family in denial, she believably ties the personal drama to the American diseases of patriarchal entitlement and the rape of the land.
