A Conversation with Jane Smiley

JANE SMILEY: LOCATION AND A GEOGRAPHER OF LOVE In her essay on place, Eudora Welty points out that Henry James once said there isn\u27t any difference between \u27the English novel\u27 and \u27the American novel,\u27 since there are only two kinds of novels at all: the good and the bad. Then Welty responds to him stating that for good novels fiction is all bound up in the local. The internal reason for that is surely that feelings are bound up in place .... The truth is, fiction depends for its life on place. Location is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of \u27What happened? Who\u27s here? Whose coming?\u27-and that is the heart\u27s field. ! In fact, the novelist shares the real estate agent\u27s mantra: location, location, location. Novelist Jane Smiley writes with great authority of people whose lives are so profoundly connected to place that they must ultimately yield to their heart\u27s purposes. Thus place is an agency of personal revelation. As the author of A Thousand Acres, in fact, Smiley has been credited with laying the major foundation piece for the Renaissance, the flowering, in the literature of the North American heartland that has occurred over the past fifteen years. Jane Smiley is the author of over ten major works of fiction, including her celebrated first novel Barn Blind, The Age of Grief, The Greenlanders, Ordinary Love and Good Will, A Thousand Acres, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, Moo, The All-True Travels and Adventures of Liddie Newton, and Horse Heaven. She has also written essays for magazines such as Vogue, The New Yorker, Practical Horseman, Harper\u27s, The New York Times Magazine and The New York Times travel section, US News, Victoria, Mirabella, Allure, The Nation, and many others. She has written on politics, farming, horse training, child-rearing, literature, impulse buying, Barbie, marriage, Monica Lewinsky, and even the trials and tribulations of getting dressed. She is a Vassar graduate and holds an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. She taught at Iowa State University from 1981 until 1996 and now lives in California with her three children, three dogs, and at least sixteen horses. Parents and children are often at the heart of Smiley\u27s writing. Very few writers are her equal in capturing the day-to-day truths of family life. And no one writes family tension as well-whether that life is in the uncompromising rooms of the horse ranch in Barn Blind; in the trackless reaches of medieval Greenland; on the thousand acres of Larry Cook\u27s place in Zebulon country in A Thousand Acres; in the Kansas-Missouri backwoods borderland traveled by the adventurous Liddie Newton; or among the stars and stumblebums who populate the racetracks of Horse Heaven. The word that comes to mind in describing Jane Smiley\u27s work is a good Renaissance word: chicanery. It\u27s the chicanery of an aging father trying to outwit his fate in A Thousand Acres, the chicanery of a university professor trying to hide his strange and wonderful hog-breeding experiment in Moo, the plotting of a widow to avenge her murdered husband in Liddie Newton, and the schemes of racetrack people to make one big killing on a horse. Jane Smiley\u27s novels are the work of a true scandal-monger, reminiscent of Charles Dickens. They\u27re tapestries of planners and schemers, the doers and the done-to, the winners and the if-onlies, the dreamers and the damned, the why\u27s and the why-not\u27s