JANE SMILEY: “THOUSAND ACRES,” “HUNDRED YEARS” AND A PULITZER

By Paul Freeman [April 2015 Interview]

In 1992, Jane Smiley won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for her novel “A Thousand Acres.” She certainly hasn’t rested on her laurels.

Smiley’s work has spanned mystery, satire, young adult fiction, a biography of Charles Dickens, a family drama set in the 14th century, a tome on novel-writing and a memoir of her experiences as a racehorse owner.

Her latest work is the enthralling “Early Warning.” It’s the second volume in a trilogy, “The Last Hundred Years.” The first volume, “Some Luck,” focused on an Iowa farming family, starting in the year 1920. “Early Warning” moves to the next generations.

Publisher’s Weekly says, “Smiley has a big cast to wrangle in the second, atom-and-adultery-haunted volume of the trilogy. Covering 1953 to 1986 at a clip of one year per chapter, the focus here is the Cold War and its fallout . . . Smiley keeps you reading; she is as deft as ever at conveying the ways in which a family develops.”

Smiley, 65, was born in Los Angeles, attended Vassar and the University of Iowa, and now resides in Carmel Valley.

She spoke with Pop Culture Classics about her work.

POP CULTURE CLASSICS:
How did the concept for the trilogy first develop in your mind?

JANE SMILEY:
Well, the first thing that came to me was the title of the whole trilogy, which is “The Last Hundred Years.” And then the next thing that came to me was the idea of going year by year. And then, because my mother was born in 1921, I thought, “Oh, why not start with 1920?,” even though that meant going on to 2019. But then it all just sort of came to me.

I knew I wanted to start in Iowa, because I wanted to talk about the food industry. And I think that’s indicative of the way that a culture works and thinks of itself. And so that’s why I started in Iowa. But the bonus of starting in Iowa is that everybody gets out and ends up all over the country. If you start out in San Francisco, chances are, you’re going to stay in San Francisco.

PCC:
The decision to devote one chapter to each year, did that end up being an advantage to you? Was it confining sometimes?

SMILEY:
Well, every decision you make about how you’re going to structure a book sets out rules and then you have to deal with them. But I actually quite love that. I was a history minor in college and I was always a history buff, so having my characters sort of move through time was a great pleasure to me. And watching them age. I’m 65 and I have really strong memories of my grandparents at my age. I have strong memories of my own children as babies and watching them grow up. So it seemed very tempting just to get my characters going and then have them grow up and see what they did.

PCC:
Having that growth, being able to follow them through their lives in the trilogy, did that give you a stronger bond with these characters than those in an ordinary novel?

SMILEY:
Maybe. I’ve loved characters in novels in the past. But I am with these characters for three volumes. And so I am quite attached to them. And in differing ways. It’s sort of like being with your family. I argue with some of them and I embrace others. So I have found myself quite attached to them.

PCC:
Is that also an unusual gift for readers - to be able to follow characters from birth through their entire lives and to the point where they’re just memories in the minds of other characters?

SMILEY:
I sure hope so. That’s for the reader to say.

PCC:
When you began “Some Luck,” did you have the entire trilogy mapped out in detail?

SMILEY:
Well, I knew it was going to go from 1920 to 2019. And I guess the first thing I did was decide what the temperamental characteristics of the characters were. Not the parents, obviously, not Walter and Rosanna, obviously, but their children. And so once I had given them their characteristics as babies and set them on their paths, I knew historically what was going to happen. But I didn’t really know how they were going to address it. For example, Frank, in volume one, has very idiosyncratic reasons for going into the army before he graduates from college. And I hadn’t planned that out. But it just sort of happened impulsively, for me as an author, as well as for him, as a character. And so then, when he gets into the army, I read a lot of books about the second World War. And my parents were both in the second World War. But I didn’t want to have him do the obvious thing, so when I sent him to North Africa and to the Italian campaign, I did that mostly because I didn’t know anything about it. And I thought it would be really interesting and it turned out to be very interesting.

PCC:
So you really loved the research process?

SMILEY:
I really, really did, yeah.

PCC:
With “Some Luck,” were you drawing on remembrances of older generations of your own family? And how much have you drawn on your own memories and experiences of the 50s through the 80s for the new book?

SMILEY:
Hardly at all. Some things are really stuck in your mind, so that you draw on them without realizing that you’re doing that. So there are ways in which Rosanna’s way of expressing herself is a little bit similar to my grandmother’s way of expressing herself. But I was not consciously drawing on them. My family history is not Iowa. It’s not farming. And they, of course, my family members, would say, “It’s way more exciting.” [Laughs] But the conscious stuff that I was intending to do had nothing to do with my own life.

PCC:
These particular decades, 50s through 80s, what makes them especially significant? What do you hope they will teach us?

SMILEY:
I guess I started in 1920, because to me, that’s the start of the modern world. And then you go through the 20s and the 30s and the war and the modern world seems to be speeding up, sort of accelerating. And to me, it’s not until you get into the 50s and the 60s that the real issues of the modern world kind of kick in - How do people express themselves? There’s much more population, so, in some sense, even though we’re not in the second World War, there’s a kind of internal chaos that manifests itself everywhere. But it’s more personal chaos and personally political chaos than the traditional chaos of countries going to war.

And then there’s all these technologies that kick in. It’s not just the technology of something like television or computers, but it’s the technology of food. When you go back to the 50s and you look at ads for how to cook or how to take care of your house, they’re really interesting, because they’re moving housewives away from traditional ways of cooking and moving them into the new frozen dinners. Your very most basic act as a person, which is to feed yourself and your family, becomes an extension of corporate life, rather than a personal act of growing or going out and buying some vegetables and some meat and cooking it. And I found that fascinating. In all the pictures from the magazines of the 50s, of the housewives, where they’re wearing these perfect dresses and they’re wearing high heels around the house and they’re wearing their hair perfectly set - that fascinated me.

And then, of course, because I grew up in the 50s, I was interested in the effect of popular culture on kids. Everybody’s watching Roy Rogers and so all these kids have six-guns, not real six-guns, but everybody’s carrying play guns. I thought that was fascinating. So it’s like the 50s and the 60s created this kind of internal chaos, the chaos of - Who am I? And how do I identify my position in the world around me? I thought that was really interesting. And then it sort of came to a head in the 70s and 80s. Since I’m a member of the Baby Boom generation, it continues to fascinate me, how volatile our generation has been about choices - in both good ways and bad ways. So that was interesting to me.

PCC:
So are you coming away from the experience with a clearer idea of the evolution of America during that hundred years?

SMILEY:
I think my ideas before I wrote the book were more clear and now that I’ve done a lot more research, they’re a lot more complex. And I always write books that kind of mix political and social ideas with personal lives, because that’s just the way I write books. And, in general, my political and social ideas are pretty strong. But every time that I start writing a book and I get interested in the characters, I become much less rigid in my views [laughs]. Because the characters are human, so my job as an author is to empathize with their point of view, even if don’t agree with it. So I might start writing a book thinking that I’m going to express a certain point of view very clearly, but then after all the characters speak up and have their say and do what they’re going to do, then the point of view that I had intended to express is much more complex than I thought it was going to be. And that fascinates me. I think that’s a wonderful thing about writing novels. So your political side, whoever you are, always becomes mediated through these voices of your characters. And if your novel is going to be good, then it’s going to be more complex. Maybe your novel-writing side is more complex than your political side.

PCC:
Over the entire span the trilogy covers, are you sometimes surprised by - despite all the technological changes - how much people have remained the same?

SMILEY:
Well, yes. I feel that, not just as a writer, but as a reader. When I go and find books from centuries ago, I can still understand what’s going on in those people’s minds. Or I find books from far, far away - that’s a constant miracle, the miracle that we can communicate across thousands of miles and across hundreds and sometimes thousands of years, that we can understand the emotional lives of characters in books, or at least, if not totally understand them, relate to them in some way. So that’s the great thing about literature, in my opinion, is that, with all the differences that it expresses about different peoples in different eras, it’s still a connector. And yeah, that’s the perennial joy of literature.

PCC:
What are the themes you most hope the reader will come away with from “Early Warning” or from the trilogy as a whole?

SMILEY:
Well, let me put it this way - my plan had been to call the last volume of the trilogy “Uh-oh.” [Laughs]. But I didn’t. Or maybe “A Bad End.” But my publisher wouldn’t go for either of those titles, I have to say.

I just want them to step back and say, “All right, what was the modern era really about?” and “Are the bad things that have happened in the modern era things that we can correct… or is it too late?” And I think the answer to that question is unclear at this point.

There are things that I intended and there are also things that I discovered after the books were written and I read through them again. And one of the things I discovered, for example, is that I do believe volume two, maybe one of the main themes of volume two is about fatherhood, which is really interesting, because these are World War II-era fathers of Baby Boomers. And World War II shaped that generation of men in some really interesting ways that I don’t think were acknowledged early on. And the way that they were fathers of their children was a real issue for Baby Boomers, because they produced a lot of children.

So I think that’s one theme of volume two. And the nature of domestic life is a theme of volume two. And I hadn’t expected it to be a theme. But I got interested in those characters and so they began expressing themselves and getting through life as best they could.

I also think one theme of volume two is the nature of love. So in volume one, we see Walter and Rosanna, who are pretty happily married, I would say, for people of their generation. But they’re so busy working on the farm that, in some sense, their marriage is a collaboration and love is a kind of secondary concept. As long as they get along well and do the work together, that’s the most important thing. But in Arthur and Frank And Lilly and Claire’s generation, love becomes the center. How do you express love in your marriage? How do get along with your partner, your spouse? So love and marriage become very central to the way that they think about their lives, because they have the freedom to do that. So I think that was a shift between the previous generation and the World War II generation.

PCC:
From your perspective, for the reader, do you want the entire trilogy be one epic experience? Would you mind if they discover the new book, then work their way back?

SMILEY:
I think the reader should do it however he or she wants. Whatever he or she is comfortable with is fine with me. I conceived them as one thing. We tried to shape each volume so that they could be read independently. But it’s really up to the reader to decide.

I love series, like Anthony Trollope’s “Palacer" series. And there’s plenty of times that I’ve started somewhere in the series and then gone back and read the earlier ones. Last year I read “The Transylvanian Trilogy,” which is a series of Hungarian novels about the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire that was written by a man named named Miklos Banffy. And I absolutely adored it. And I did read them in order and I really enjoyed reading them in order and I got a lot out of them. But readers have to decide what they want to do. The writer can only just offer the books and then the reader does what the reader wants to do.

PCC:
You write in such rich detail. The power of observation, is that a gift you were born with? Or is it something you’ve consciously honed?

SMILEY:
That’s an interesting question. We’ve talked about that, my husband and I have talked about that recently. I grew up in a really gossipy family. And it wasn’t just that they were telling stories about one another, but it was that they had, for many years, observed one another in detail and they had a lot of opinions [laughs]. And so, that gave me a lot of practice in observing and having opinions and thinking about and wondering about other people’s motivations.

So have I always been observant? I think so, because there was always a premium put on being observant, being a good eavesdropper, listening to what really happened, as opposed to some aunt’s version of what might have happened. So that was always a great pleasure for me. And then I was an avid reader as a kid. So I would read a book and then I would look around my own life and notice various things. No one in my family ever said, “Don’t look at that,” whatever it was. They always said, “Oh, what’s that?” So yeah, I guess I was raised to be observant. And not necessarily for any positive reason [laughs], but only so you could one-up Aunt Ruth, when she told her story about whatever.

PCC:
Did you think, when something struck you, “Oh, I should put this in my mental notebook, in case I can make use of it someday, in some way?

SMILEY:
Well, I did not grow up planning to be a writer. I started thinking about that, when I was in college. I was 18. So the rest of the time before that, I was a reader and a lover of horses. And I loved observing horses. And in order to be a good rider, you have to observe and contemplate how the horse is behaving. But, as a child, no, I wasn’t planning to be a writer.

PCC:
You’ve explored a number of different genres, is that because you like to challenge yourself, keep things fresh?

SMILEY:
No, it’s just because I’m curious and am interested in different genres. My reading life pre-dates my writing life. And when I was growing up, I loved Agatha Christie. I loved “David Copperfield.” I loved “Giants in the Earth.” I loved P.G. Wodehouse. So my interests were pretty inclusive. And so, because I liked all those forms, I thought it would be fun to try them.

PCC:
Seeing your work translated into film a couple of times, was that a gratifying experience?

SMILEY:
Yes and no. There’s only been a few films of my books. I didn’t especially like the film of “A Thousand Acres” [starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jason Robards]. But I was quite fond of the film called “The Secret Lives of Dentists” [with Hope Davis, Campbell Scott, Denis Leary and Robin Tunney, directed by Alan Rudolph, based on Smiley’s novella “The Age of Grief”]. But somebody came to me a few years ago, inspired by “Game of Thrones” and he said was going to do a TV series based on “The Greenlanders” [which follows a 14th century family in Greenland]. And I thought, “Wow, that would be totally interesting!” [Laughs] But it never went anywhere. So I guess I don’t have enough experience to say whether I like it or not.

PCC:
It seems like the trilogy would work as a series or mini-series.

SMILEY:
Oh, absolutely. I want them to come and say, “Okay, this is going to be on TV for the next 10 years. We’re going to go year by year.” [laughs]. I don’t know how they would do the actors. I wish they could, but I don’t see how they would have everybody be babies and then grow up. They could use the same actors for the mature versions… I don’t know. That’s for them to worry about. It would be fun. Maybe it should be an animated series.

PCC:
The Pulitzer Prize, what did that mean to you, in terms of validation? Did you feel you had arrived?

SMILEY:
Well, you know, it was really exciting. But it’s really more like a lightning strike than a life-changer. It does make you more visible. But I was living in Ames [she was a professor at Iowa State University] and I was pregnant. I didn’t go out on the road. Michael Cunningham and I once compared notes and he had a much more life-changing experience, because he was single and he was free and he was able to go out and do lots of things. But I wasn’t, because I was three or four months pregnant. So I basically got a bunch of flowers in the mail and thanked a lot of people and then went on with my life.

But it is definitely true that your obituary, after you die - mine will now say, “Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley.” And that becomes, for other people, who you are in a lot of ways, the short-hand version of who you are. But that’s okay. Whatever. Eh, so what?

PCC:
Have you felt added pressure to live up to the honors and awards you’ve received?

SMILEY:
Well, this is how I feel about that - There are some authors who get the awards right off the bat and then that’s where the pressure is. But there are other authors who get to publish two or three obscure novels and then the awards come later. And they, in some sense, are the lucky ones, because they’ve already developed their habits; they already have a relationship to their work; they already have a way of just keeping going. And so the award comes and it’s a wonderful thing, but then they just go on. And my example for that is Anthony Trollope, who wrote his first two novels when he was in Ireland - and they sold nothing. Nobody cared. But they gave him good practice and so, when he came back to England and started writing the Barsetshire series, he already knew what he was doing. So he was able to handle success. And I liked that.

That was how my writing life was. I had three novels and they got a little taps on the head. No big deal. And then the recognition began to come in and it didn’t really change my life a lot, because I was already used to writing; I already had ideas for the next ones; I already had plans. And so the rewards were just extras. They weren’t the point.

PCC:
For you, what are the most rewarding and the most challenging aspects of life as a writer?

SMILEY:
Writing.

PCC:
The writing itself is both the most rewarding and the most challenging?

SMILEY:
Yes. I mean, it’s rewarding, because it’s challenging. And that’s partly because I like to try different things. But even if I think I’m doing something that I already know how to do, sometimes I’m wrong - I don’t already know how to do that. And a thing that I thought was going to be easy turns out to be hard. Or a thing that I thought was going to be hard turns out to be easy.

But I just like to do it. I love to write. And I like my own work, which is a good thing. I’m not a perfectionist, like some writers are. They write down a page or whatever and then they torment themselves by saying how horrible it is. I don’t do that. I like to just get it on the page and keep going, because I’ve discovered over the years that, when I come back to it, a day later or a week later or whatever, my ideas about it are different from the ones I had when I was putting it on the page. And I trust my later self more than I trust my self that’s putting it on the page. So I just ignore myself as I’m writing it. And I’m not a perfectionist. And I always know it can be fixed.

So that’s fine. And the challenges come sort of randomly - you didn’t realize something was going to be a challenge or you didn’t realize something wasn’t going to be a challenge. So you cannot think about them. You don’t foresee them. You just keep going and do the best you can and then come back and try again and work on it again and make it as good as you can to get it out there. Now you might really love it or you might really hate it and that does not predict what audiences, what readers and critics are going to respond to. So you don’t know what other people are going to like. There are lots of authors who have preferences, among their own works, that are completely different from the general view of what’s good or bad in their own work. So I think that’s fascinating, too.

PCC:
Is that true of you?

SMILEY:
I’m not telling.

PCC:
[Laughs] Well, I really enjoyed “Early Warning” and look forward to volume three.

SMILEY:
Well, I really like volume two, so I’m glad you did, too. Visit the artist’s website: www.therealjanesmiley.com