Jane Smiley Biography

Jane Smiley's congenial turf is the dailiness of daily life, as its domestic rhythms play themselves out in a variety of settings and circumstances. She writes, in short, about families—a subject that once occupied literature's very center but now seems ignored. That Smiley came to wide critical attention with A Thousand Acres, a novel that won her both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Circle Critics Award, is true enough, but it is even truer that earlier collections (The Age of Grief and Ordinary Love & Good Will) amply demonstrated that she could write beautifully about family members.

As a tale of a tyrannical father who resolves to divide his thousand-acre Iowa farm among his three daughters, only to slip into madness, curse his offspring, and venture out alone into a fearsome storm, Smiley's novel is filled with correlations to King Lear—not only in terms of allusion and plot but also in its inevitable arc toward tragedy. Generally speaking, reviewer-critics praised Smiley's large ambitions and infectious style, but some worried that the novel's schema was a bit too schematic. However, there are at least as many reasons to think of Dreiser's Sister Carrie or Arthur Miller's The Death of a Salesman as one turns the pages of Smiley's altogether engrossing novel.

Moreover, King Lear represents only a fraction of Smiley's concerns; others include farming as it has evolved into big business, dysfunctional families, and even dashes of feminist theory. Perhaps Smiley tried to pack too many disparate concerns between the covers of a single novel (a criticism that might also be made of Moo, her effort to squeeze a large land-grant university under the novelist's microscope), but it is clear that A Thousand Acres is a brava performance in ways that Barn Blind, At Paradise Gate, or even The Greenlanders are not. For in A Thousand Acres, the slow gathering of quotidian detail means to tackle large, existential questions: Not only what it means to be a true daughter but also, as Ron Carlson points out, "what is the price to be paid for trying one's whole life to please a proud father who slenderly knows himself—who coveted his land the way he loved his daughters, not wisely but too well?"

By contrast, Moo asks what kind of institution is the American university in the 1990s, and it sets about making its estimates by focusing not so much on individual characters (several administrators, a handful of colorful professors, and a slice of students) within an academic setting as on the setting itself. "What is a university?" one of her characters asks, and the answer seems hazy at best. Indeed, the novel's main character is not a human being at all but rather a pig named Earl Butz. Like most of those feeding from the university's deep trough, Smiley's pig lives only to eat and then to eat some more. He is, in short, the deep secret hidden in the bowels of Moo University. As Provost Harstad puts it:

Over the years … everyone around the university had given free reign to his or her desires, and the institution had, with a fine, trembling responsiveness, answered, "Why not?" It had become, more than anything, a vast network of interlocking wishes.

No doubt there will be those who resist Smiley's portrait of the university as hog heaven ("Unfair! Unfair!" I can hear them muttering), just as there must have been those Iowa farmers who did not see their lives on the land accurately reflected in A Thousand Acres. But a novelist has other allegiances, and Smiley's commitment to the dictums of art has produced reams of extraordinary prose already and promises even more in the future.