"A Thousand Acres"

[fiefoe]

The novel starts rather quietly, so that I almost forgot Jane Smiley is rewriting King Lear.

• The T intersection of CR 686 perched on a little rise, a rise nearly as imperceptible as the bump in the center of an inexpensive plate. From that bump, the earth was unquestionably flat, the sky unquestionably domed,
• Acreage and financing were facts as basic as name and gender in Zebulon County.
• again, for the first time since Linda was born, of how it was in those families, how generations of silence could flow from a single choice.
• I in my Sunday dress and hat, driving in the Buick to church, was a beneficiary of this grand effort, someone who would always have a floor to walk on. However much these acres looked like a gift of nature, or of God, they were not. We went to church to pay our respects, not to give thanks.
• In my youthful estimation, Laurence Cook defined both categories. To really believe that others even existed in either category was to break the First Commandment.
• Perhaps there is a distance that is the optimum distance for seeing one’s father, farther than across the supper table or across the room, somewhere in the middle distance: <>  My father had no minister, no one to make him gel for us even momentarily. My mother died before she could present him to us as only a man, with habits and quirks and preferences, before she could diminish him in our eyes enough for us to understand him. I wish we had understood him. That, I see now, was our only hope.
• On the other hand, perhaps she hadn’t mistaken anything at all, and had simply spoken as a woman rather than as a daughter. That was something, I realized in a flash, that Rose and I were pretty careful never to do.
• “See? The wisdom of the plains. Pretend nothing happened.”
• One of the many benefits of this private project, I thought at the time, was that it showed me a whole secret world, a way to have two lives, to be two selves. I felt larger and more various than I had in years,
• What I think of is our babyhoods perched thoughtlessly on the filmiest net of the modern world, over layers of rock, Wisconsin till, Mississippian carbonate, Devonian limestone, layers of dark epochs, and we seem not so much in danger (my father checked the grates often) as fleeting, as if our lives simply passed then, and this memory is the only photograph of some nameless and unknown children who may have lived and may have died, but at any rate have vanished into the black well of time.
• I couldn’t believe that I had ever found his smile merely charming. Another lesson in that lifelong course of study about the tricks of appearance.
• If he said, “Cary, give me a kiss,” that way he always did, without warning, half an order, half a plea, she would pop into his lap and put her arms around his neck and smack him on the lips.
• What I had forgotten was the pleasure of a guest for dinner, someone unrelated, with sociable habits learned far away.
• I wonder if there is anyone who isn’t perked up by the sight of a Monopoly board, all the colors, all the bits and pieces, all the possibilities. Jess was the race car, Rose was the shoe, Ty was the dog, and I was the thimble.
  In this Jess and Pete thought alike—like city boys, my father would have said, looking for the payoff in a situation rather than the pitfall.
• She knew one of the great family truths, that aunts always help, while moms always think it would be good for you if you did it yourself.
• There was a way in which I could look at my life as an unending battle to make friends,
• Mary was like my father in her assumption that children were born to serve their elders, and that their service was to be directed rather than requested.
• It seemed like I had, but actually, you never know, just by remembering, how many facts there were to have faced. Your own endurance might be a pleasant fiction allowed you by others who’ve really faced the facts.
• I have noticed that a mother left eternally young through death comes to seem as remote as your own young self... It’s as easy to judge her misapprehensions and mistakes as it is to judge your own, and to fall into a habit of disrespect, as if all her feelings must have been as shallow and jejeune as you think yours used to be.
• I also felt the habitual fruitlessness of thinking about (my mother)... I could become her biographer, be drawn into her life, and into excuses for her or blame of her, but that seemed like an impractical, laborious, and failing substitute for what I had missed in the last twenty-two years.
• did believe in the unbroken surface of the unsaid.
• “And what are his secrets?” “Well, I think one of them is that he’s afraid of his daughters.”
• It’s just that he’s cannier and smarter than he lets on, and in the slippage between what he looks like and what he is, there’s a lot of freedom.” “Sounds good,”
• Yes, it was freshly evident that he had impulsively betrayed himself by handing over the farm.
• I reflected as I opened the screen door that speculations about my father were never idle or entertaining, but always something to be flinched from.
• It felt like a fury, but it also felt like a panic, as if her criticisms were simultaneously unjust and just, and the sequence of events that I remembered perfectly was only a theory, a case made in my own defense that a jury might or might not believe.
• After you’ve confided long enough in someone, he or she assumes the antagonism you might have just been trying out.
• But our gazes were fixed on each other’s faces, and we were unable to keep ourselves from testing the fix by moving, turning, bending down. The fix held, until I climbed into the truck
• I imagine it as one of those winter nights on the plains, clear and black, when space itself seems to touch the ground with a universal chill,
• time, the peaceful self-regard of early grief, when the fact that you are still alive and functioning is so strangely similar to your previous life that you think you are okay.
• We drove it in a kind of wholesome silence, carrying our whole long marriage, all the hope and kindness that it represented, with us. What it felt like was sitting in Sunday school singing “Jesus Loves Me,” sitting in the little chairs, surrounded by sunlight and bright drawings, and having those first inklings of doubt, except that doubt presents itself simply as added knowledge, something new, for the moment, to set beside what is already known.