A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

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: he is dwarfed by trees or the sweep of a hill, but his features are still visible, his body language still distinct.  Well, that is a distance I never found.  He was never dwarfed by the landscape--the fields, the buildings, the white pine windbreak were as much my father as if he had grown them and shed them like a husk.

A Thousand Acres is the other Iowa book I read on my trip, though by the time I started it, we were driving through the red rock formations of southern Utah and it no longer made much sense.  Interestingly, it shares more with Marilynne Robinson's Home than just a setting.  Like Home, it is in part the story of a black sheep's homecoming, except Jess Clark isn't an alcoholic like Jack Boughton--worse, he's a draft dodger, and a vegetarian.  Like Home, A Thousand Acres is concerned with the difficulty of coming home again, and the way that putting things back together can be as disruptive as tearing them apart.

But where Home takes its literary archetypes from the Bible, A Thousand Acres is a straight up re-telling of King Lear.  Jess is the Edmund figure, come home to threaten his brother's inheritance, but the focus of the story is on Ginny, whose name is an echo of "Goneril."  The plot is set in motion when Ginny's father, like Lear, prematurely leaves his immense farm (the thousand acres of the title) to his three daughters, Ginny, Rose, and Caroline.  (Guess which one is which.)

I have said before that adapting Shakespeare is a dangerous move, because it's not likely that you're going to be able to do it better, and even when you do it well half the time the reader is simply reminded of how good Shakespeare is.  What makes A Thousand Acres work in spite of this is a simple tweak Smiley makes in the story: all of the "good" characters from Lear are bad, and the "bad" characters are good.  Ginny's father, Larry, is a cruel and inscrutable old man, who quickly realizes that he has given away his livelihood and responds by lashing out at everyone and driving around Iowa piss drunk.  He rediscovers his love for the distant Caroline only because her demurral of his offer means that she doesn't share in his resentment.  Ginny, on the other hand, does her best to please her tyrannical father, who responds with this parodic version of Lear's epic "Suspend thy purpose if thou didst intend / To make this creature fruitful" speech:

He leaned his face toward mine.  "You don't have to drive me around any more, or cook the goddamned breakfast or clean the goddamned house."  His voice modulated into a scream.  "Or tell me what I can do and what I can't do.  You barren whore!  I know all about you, you slut.  You've been creeping here and there all your life, making up to this one and that one.  But you're not really a woman, are you?  I don't know what you are, just a bitch, is all, just a dried-up whore bitch."

[Spoiler alert for this paragraph.]  This soliloquy hits especially hard because Ginny has tried and failed for years to have a child, suffering through multiple miscarriages, and her father's accusation that she is a slut becomes tragically ironic when Rose helps Ginny remember late in the novel that their father sexually assaulted them both as children.  The switched valences don't end there--even Ty, Ginny's husband and the Albany figure, is reimagined so that his sympathy with Lear is conceived as a kind pusillanimous avoidance of conflict, and a failure to support his wife in any meaningful way.

Smiley is no Robinson, and the writing itself is nothing to speak of, but the plot spirals out of control in an especially Shakespearean, and violent, way that was refreshing after the plodding pace of Home, which is mostly about people crying around a kitchen table.   I'm not sure, though, what a reader who wasn't familiar with Lear would get out of it--half the fun for me, or even most of it, was seeing the way that each of the characters was flipped. 

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

The Adventures of Augie March begins with America:

I am an American, Chicago born--Chicago, that somber city--and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.

And ends with it, too:

Look at me, going everywhere! Why, I am a sort of Columbus of those near-at-hand and believe you can come to them in this immediate terra incognita that spreads out in every gaze. I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn't prove there was no America.

In his introduction, Christopher Hitchens identifies Augie's opening assertion as essentially radical. Augie, a Jew and the descendant of immigrants, claims an American birthright, unthinkable in the 1920's of the novel's opening and not much less so when it was written in 1953. We are inheritors of this assertion and will not find it strange; most of us will take it for granted that America is land of opportunity, an immigrant nation, where the ladders of social mobility can be scaled quicker.

Still, we can appreciate Augie's bold claim to exhibit a new conception of our national character. Augie is an American, that is to say, democratic. He tells us early on that the phrase "various jobs" is the "Rosetta stone" of his existence, and indeed his "adventures" can be summed as a series of tasks: He is a dog groomer, a union organizer, a petty thief, a sales clerk, a ship's pharmacist, an assistant to more than one millionaire. In one of the book's greatest sections, he spends a long period in Mexico training an eagle to hunt lizards. Some of these jobs are menial and low-class and others come with fancy wardrobes, but the overall line of progression is fluctuated, not upward as in some Horatio Alger story. When I say that Augie is democratic, this is what I mean--the dogged insistence that meaning and fulfillment, though not likely to be found, can be approached from all sides and all stations:

"How is your campaign after a worthwhile fate, Augie?" asked Clem, for he knew a lot about me, you see. Alas, why should he kid me so! I was only trying to do right, and I had broken my dome, lost teeth, got burned in the progress, a mighty slipshod campaigner. Lord, what a runner after things, servant of love, embarker on schemes, recruit of sublime ideas, and good-time Charlie! Why, it was a crying matter, no fooling, to anyone who might know which side was up, that here was I trying to refuse to lead a disappointed life.

Democratic, too, are Augie's attitudes toward people. On his ship during wartime he becomes a sort of confidant and advice-giver for his shipmates and tells us, "I advocated love, especially." Love is democratic because it regards social class, like all other concerns alien to mere personhood, as irrelevant. Augie's attitude reminds me of the King of France from King Lear, who remarks that "Love is not love / When it is mingled with regards that stand / Aloof from th'entire point." So it happens that, in my favorite section of the book, Augie risks estrangement from his heiress girlfriend, Lucy, in order to help a a friend obtain an illegal abortion. Lucy's parents believe he is mixed up with the girl sexually, not that it would matter if he weren't, and Augie mistakenly expects from Lucy the same kind of inconsiderate love that he gives freely:

Inside, on the turned-over heels of the yard shoes I hadn't remembered to change, I walked to the mirror to knot my black tie and saw backward, by the drape in the living room, the tense belly of Uncle Charlie, his sharp feet prepared, and sitting waiting in the oriental mix-up of brass, silk, wool, and all that gave the place so much power, Lucy, her mother, and Sam, observing me. I felt there was a big machine set against me. But I had come in order not to disappoint Lucy, toward whom, given their chance, my feelings could have shone and warmed again. I expected poisoned looks, against which I was coated and immune; at least, my greater trouble made such looks seem negligible; and I wasn't willing to be tagged for lascivious crime and false pretenses or whatever the coutns were that they thought they had against me. By no means nervous, therefore, I judged that I had only to do with Lucy, no fortune hunting now involved, for I could go any distance independent of brothers, relations, and all, provided that her impulse was a true one and she was, as she had always said, in love.

But love for others is not always the same as love for Augie, who has no conception of the love of money or the love of power. When he calls himself, at book's end, a "Columbus of those near-at-hand," he celebrates the love of people, the personal, individual life as opposed to the "big machine" which only has the power to oppose.

No wonder, then, that Bellow rejects the prose of Hemingway--who might be called typically American in that he exalts the stark, shorn pioneerism of Emerson and Thoreau--in favor of a looser, more exuberant style that is democratic in the sense that no word seems to excessive to leave out. Augie March is dense and allusive, delighting in its metaphors. The hem of a dress is "stiff as a line of Euclid." Elsewhere "the wheat looked like the glass of wheat." The human heart "circulates and warms, when it's piled at any bar or break, burns inward or out with typical embers or sores, and makes a track of fever or fire whose corresponding part is darkness and cold gaps." It is easy to lose the thread, and such long-windedness fails perhaps as often as it succeeds, but one comes to feel that, like Augie, such failures must be permitted.

Hitchens refuses to call it "The Great American Novel," though apparently Martin Amis does so freely. I myself categorically reject the existence of such a thing, but I will note that Augie March is obsessed with the reason that such a novel is impossible: America is too vast, too broad, too pluralistic to be pinned down. It is, in short, like Augie.

King Lear by William Shakespeare

Back when Jim and I took a Shakespeare class together, I chose not to review each play, or even the plays as a set because, for the most part, they didn't take very long to read. Plus, I just didn't read a lot of them. Shakespeare hasn't changed, but I have--King Lear is one of Shakespeare's most challenging works, and when I teach it in class I would like to know what I am talking about (or be able to fake it convincingly). So with this one I took my time.

That Shakespeare is better experienced with great patience and caution, savoring his wit and multiple layers of meaning, will come as a surprise to no one. Whether I enjoyed the experience more I cannot say. It's been years since I've read any of the other plays and, more importantly, King Lear isn't really a work meant to be enjoyed. It is inconceivably bleak--so bleak, in fact, that until the twentieth century, most of the time if you saw it performed you would see a version doctored by a scholar named Nahum Tate, which went so far as to add extra characters and replace Shakespeare's unhappy ending with a more palatable one.

Shakespeare's Lear is taken from the mythological Leir, a king of ancient Britain long before Roman conquest, and the story begins essentially the same: Lear, deciding to retire, wishes to split his kingdom among his three daughters, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia, and says that he will give the largest portion to whoever professes that they love him the best. He expects that his favorite, Cordelia, will win this prize, but her humility and honesty prevent her from giving the same kind of empty, fawning answer as her sisters, and she is cut out of the inheritance and leaves to marry the King of France. Afterward, powerless Lear is mistreated by Goneril and Regan and their husbands, the Dukes of Albany and Cornwall, who strip from him his retinue of attendants and insult him until he is essentially driven out of both of their homes.

There is a subplot with another nobleman, Gloucester, and his sons Edmund and Edgar. Edmund, who is illegitimate and cannot inherit anything of Gloucester's, fakes a letter from Edgar professing to plan their father's murder, and Edgar must escape and take the disguise of an escaped lunatic. Eventually, the whole thing comes to a head when Cordelia and the King of France invade Britain to retake it from the forces of Goneril, Regan, Albany, Cornwall, and Edmund.

But Tate isn't the only revisionist. The Leir story, as recounted in Geoffrey Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, ends with Cordelia victorious, and she goes on to rule Britain after Leir's death. But Shakespeare pulls a reverse-Tarantino and ends Lear for the worst, with Cordelia captured and eventually executed, Lear having long been driven mad by his indignation and shame. At the end, only Edgar, Albany, and Lear's loyal servant Kent are left alive.

Why did Shakespeare change the ending of the Leir story? I think this is the most interesting question that Lear presents. One reason may be political, as the events of the play reflect somewhat the reign of James I, who had attempted to do the reverse of Lear's actions and unite England, Scotland, and Wales, though it is unclear to me whether Lear supports or condemns James' efforts.

Another answer I think can be found in one of the play's most significant themes, the significance of nature. Lear is full of disguises, trickery, and false speech, and the "truth" is always clearer to the audience than it is to the characters of the play. In one great scene, Lear, Edgar, and Lear's fool have taken shelter from a storm in an old house, and they babble and talk circuitously--a man becoming mad, a sane man pretending to be mad, and a court jester, whose riddles belie the most wisdom of anyone in the play. These men appear to be quite similar, but in truth their natures are wholly different from one another. In another way, Lear's absurd wish that Cordelia appear to love him more than Goneril or Regan is what sets the entire tragedy in motion.

The purpose of the bleak ending, then, may be that Shakespeare is telling us something about life. At one point the half-mad Lear says to Edgar, "Nature's above art in that respect," i.e., the respect of suffering--more suffering occurs in life than can be truly captured in art. If this is the case, Shakespeare may be asking us to view King Lear, at its heart cruel, unforgiving, and senseless, as a mimetic work, imitating the cruelty of an unforgiving and senseless world.