598 The American Century: Literature since 1945(1935–) is that it refuses to accommodate the West to these notions of liberatory
flight. The women and men in the stories of Smiley, for instance, are caught up in
the conflicts of family life, condemned to see in themselves “the fusing and mixing
of their parents” and to scrabble for material success or just survival, even though
the places where they work out their fates are vast and open – where “prairie settlers
always saw a sea or an ocean of grass.” So in A Thousand Acres (1991), Smiley rewrites
the story of King Lear and his daughters, transporting it to a farm in Iowa. The book
is at once a subtle but radical transformation of the Shakespearean tragedy, a vision-
ary version of the politics of the family, particularly fathers and daughters, and an
unraveling of some familiar Western tropes. Life in the West, Smiley intimates,
can be as embroiled in the past, disputes over blood and earth, as anywhere else:
in the world of A Thousand Acres, we are told, “acreage and financing were facts of
life as basic as name and gender.”
The site of the three novels of Marilyn Robinson is the Midwest: a landscape of
open prairies and small towns that she inherits from two writers she resembles,
Willa Cather and Wright Morris. Housekeeping (1980), her first novel, is set in
Fingerbone, Idaho, a place similar in some details to the small town of Sandpoint,
Idaho, where Robinson was born and grew up, while Gilead (2000) and Home (2008)
take place in the small, secluded town of Gilead, Iowa. All three novels rehearse, with
gentle fluency, the vagaries of memory and the struggle for belief, the need to find
some anchorage in the literal vacancies of the prairie and the more troubling
vacancies of a sometimes inhospitable world. So, Robinson’s first novel considers
housekeeping, not just in the domestic sense, but in the larger sense of keeping a
spiritual home for oneself and family in the face of abandonment and loss. And her
other two novels – companion pieces that record different but often concurrent
events in the lives of two families – weave a meditation on social and familial division,
and the search made by each generation for a sense of being and meaning, a way to
live with decency and dignity, passion and purpose. All three books attend to
fundamental issues of remembering and believing in a deceptively simple, gently
allusive manner, in prose that is remarkable for its limpid purity, its crystalline
clarity. “To look at this place,” the narrator of Gilead, a dying pastor called John
Ames, observes, “it’s just a cluster of houses strung along a few roads.... But what
must Galilee have been like? You can’t tell so much from the appearance of a place.”
Town, home, family and these books that meditate on them share this: quiet surfaces
concealing depths and labyrinths. What appears to be commonplace or calm,
unruffled, turns out, in the end, to offer a glimpse of what Ames himself calls
“the exquisite primary fact of existence.”
The politics of place and family are also played out in a very different key in the
work of E. Annie Proulx, whatever setting she has chosen. In The Shipping News
(1993), for example, set in Newfoundland, she satirizes what some American
politicians like to refer to lovingly as family values. Violence and abusive sex are all
in the family here. So, too, is lovelessness – so much so that the main character feels
at an early age that “he had been given to the wrong family, that somewhere his real
people ... longed for him.” Nevertheless, while the book does not by any meansGGray_c05.indd 598ray_c 05 .indd 598 8 8/1/2011 7:31:33 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 33 PM