Sarah Anne Johnson | September 2017

Jane Smiley

EXCERPT

Jane Smiley considers her first three novels, Barn Blind (1980), Paradise Gate (1981), and Duplicate Keys (1984), practice for her later work. It turns out that her practice paid off with A Thousand Acres, Smiley’s seventh book and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Smiley is known for exploring the farm country and badlands of South Dakota, personal and family relationships, and issues such as the industrialization of the land, the incorporation of our food supply, and land preservation, all in captivating narratives the circle around these issues. While Smiley’s themes are hefty, her characters remain utterly human–vulnerable, loving, shifty, withdrawn, reckless, and kind. Readers can’t help but want to know more about them.

In addition to her characters, Smiley renders the natural world that is so much at stake in our modern world, beautifully and with compassion. The opening scene to Some Luck, the first volume in her The Last Hundred Years trilogy, captures a scene in which a loss in nature works out to the benefit of the main character, Walter.

The owl floated out for maybe twenty yards, dropped toward the snowy pasture. Then came a high screaming, and the owl rose again, this time with a full-grown rabbit in its talons, writhing, going limp, probably deadened by fear. Walter shook himself.

…A rabbit, even a screaming rabbit? That was one less rabbit after his oat plants this spring.

The Last Hundred Years, the trilogy, is Jane Smiley’s most recent literary feat. The trilogy includes the novels Some Luck, Early Warning, and Golden Age, and covers the lives of the Langdon family over the course of a hundred years, from 1920 to 2020. Each chapter is dedicated to a year in the life of the family, moving through the generations. With this trilogy, Smiley has been said to “strike a fine balance between the history of ideas and the history of everyday life.” (Washington Post, October 2015.) 

In addition to writing fourteen novels, Jane Smiley has written short story collections, nonfiction books including an exploration of Charles Dickens and ways of looking at the novel. She has also written young adult novels, and a teleplay in 1995. 

Sara Anne Johnson: How did you get started writing and what have you done over the years to develop your craft?

Jane Smiley: I started in college, with creative writing classes. I wrote my first novel my senior year because I was fascinated by the various relationships that my fellow students were having, which seemed simultaneously dramatic and weird, especially compared to my own relationship, which seemed friendly and easy-going (based around shared curiosity between my husband and myself about politics, travel, and history). I rewrote my novel when my husband and I traveled to Europe in 1971 for a year—he carried the typewriter—and I also kept a journal (which I wish I could find). we applied to grad school, and I did not get in, but we moved to Iowa City anyway, because he did get in to the history grad program. I wormed my way first into the English grad program and then into the workshop, and I was in no way a star. But I learned a lot from reading what my fellow students, such as T.C. Boyle and Richard Bausch, were writing and also from what they had to say about my work. After grad school, I spent an academic year in Iceland, where I read and read and read, and also wrote, both letters and fiction. It was very dark most of the time, so I wrote deep into the night and slept until sun up, which happened about one in the afternoon. The importance of all of this is that I got into the habit of writing, or trying things out, of seeing my work as a way to explore. When I came home, I finished my degree and got married and had a child. We lived in a little apartment, and my husband had a decent job, so I decided to write about a situation that I was familiar with and also curious about. That was Barn Blind. I sold it to my best friend, who had left the workshop and gone into publishing. Her editorial boss was out of the office much of the time, being psychoanalysed, and he said she could buy it if she didn’t pay much for it, which she didn’t—up from $5,000 to $7,500 because there was another little offer. I then got an agent. Staying in Iowa was a great idea because the lifestyle was relaxed and cheap and also gave me insights into subjects that I came to think were important, like farming and use of the land.

Johnson: In what cases would you recommend that a writer participate in an MFA program? 

Smiley: MFA programs are all different. The one I work for at UC Riverside has both a BFA and an MFA program, and I think both programs give aspiring writers the chance to do a lot of reading, a lot of writing, and a lot of connecting with other writers, both fellow students and teachers. UC Riverside is a very diverse campus and a high proportion of students are first-generation college students, which means that they have a lot of interesting stories and experiences that are not necessarily part of the literary canon, and also that they get to meet all kinds of other students who share their experiences but come from other towns or regions. I think the history of literature shows that young writers benefit from spending time with other young writers—most writers have over the years congregated somewhere—New York City, London, Iowa City. Sharing ideas and stories gives a young writer a chance to try things out and let others see his or her work. But programs are idiosyncratic, so you always hope to fit in, but, like everything else, it is a bit of a gamble. Am I going to spend tens of thousands a year to go to Columbia? Is that a good idea? Maybe, maybe not. At least, for grad students, the UCR MFA is free (though small).

Johnson: How does teaching inform your own writing life?

Smiley: Teaching is a way of reminding yourself of what you know. I teach both writing seminars and reading seminars. It is always fun to set up a syllabus and read and reread the books you have assigned. This last term, I assigned some that I knew well, like Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate, some I hadn’t read in years, like Terry MacMillan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back, and one I hadn’t yet read, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout. I was interested in how my responses had changed over the years to the ones I knew, and also in how my student’s responses differed from mine. I think that is a great aspect of teaching literature and of writing—tastes change, and students are in many ways a test of those changes. When I teach writing seminars, I have the students do a draft a week, so they have to work hard. I am always fascinated by how the stories evolve and how the students respond to each other’s analysis. I do not allow them to be judgmental, only analytical. This gives the writers a chance to try things out and play with their work, which I think is the most important thing they can learn to do. Once the students have experienced the pleasures of playing around with their work, then they are more interested in it and less fearful of it. Play is fertile.

Johnson: You’ve said that your first three novels, Barn Blind (1980), Paradise Gate (1981), and Duplicate Keys (1984), were practice for your later work. Practice in what way? 

Smiley: Practice in every way—how to write the novel (each one was a different form, based on different material), how to get through the publishing experience, how to withstand a little attention but not too much, how to be modest in your goals, how to keep at it, how to juggle writing and parenting (day care always is good), how to get interested in various subjects and pursue your interests, how to stay out of the center of the publishing world (no strong feelings of competition or anxiety because you are surrounded by others more famous or praised than you are), how to be willing to try things out, understanding that each one has to be different from the last one, and therefore you have to go about it in a slightly different way. How to negotiate the business aspect—my best friend was not allowed by her new boss to buy Duplicate Keys, so I had to come to terms with my disappointment about that and find a new publisher (Knopf, as it turned out).

Johnson: You read one hundred novels before writing 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. How does your reading life inform your writing life and what are you reading now?

Smiley: Since I am teaching now, most of the books I read are books I am teaching (not all of which I have read before I put them on the syllabus—for example, I am teaching a course in the comic novel and I saw Paul Beatty’s book The Sellout was coming out in paperback. I read the first few pages and thought that it was irreverent and challenging, so I put it on the syllabus. Others, like Northanger Abbey, I’ve read many times. I also review a few books every year, and I also rummage around on my bookshelves for books I’ve bought but not read. Sometimes I read books I have read and enjoyed, but not as often as some people I know who, say, read Pride and Prejudice once a year. When I was reading books for 13 Ways, I started with known greats from long ago, like Don Quixote, then explored unknown older books, like The Heptameron. There were books I could not skip, obviously, like Moby Dick. Others I just happened upon because I was in a bookstore and the book I’d intended to buy was not available. Authors would recommend other authors. Lermontov, for example, recommended Sir Walter Scott, whom I had never read, and he got me to read James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. I read The Eustace Diamonds and fell in love with Anthony Trollope, and I read Therese Raquin, and didn’t like it, but got interested in Zola, whose Rougon Maquart series I came to really enjoy. So, I started out with intentions that got random as novels proliferated.

Johnson: How much did what you learned through this reading list impact your decision to take on a trilogy?

Smiley: I don’t know. I didn’t intend to write a trilogy, but as soon as I named it The Last Hundred Years, I know it had to be multivolume, or it would be too heavy to lift.

Johnson: How did writing a biography of Charles Dickens impact your writing life? What drew you to him in particular?

Smiley: I was contacted by an editor who had funding for a biography series about writers who had impacted modern life, and I proposed Dickens, who wasn’t on the list at that point. I always loved David Copperfield, Our Mutual Friend, and A Tale of Two Cities. He had a very interesting life, simultaneously secretive and open, and I thought he should be on the list. I wanted to focus on how his books reflected some of his life, both the secret parts and the open parts. I also wanted to be respectful of his own desires and intentions. I think that biographers often think of their subjects as mindless beings, and they, the biographers, know more about their subjects’ motivations than their subjects do. I think this is not true, and that the biographer needs to follow the lead of the subject. That’s what I tried to do for Dickens.

Johnson: What is the role of research in your fiction and how do you go about conducting your research?

Smiley: Research is both interesting in itself and inspiring. I get curious about a subject (for example the Kansas troubles of the 1850s) and then start reading about it. Pretty soon, the details of what happened then inspire me, and begin to coalesce into an idea for a novel or a nonfiction book. Details are what differentiates one work from another—details of setting or character or cause and effect change the plot and the outcome, as well as the theme of the piece. Quite often, I think that I know what the theme will be, but the research modifies or changes the theme. Part of my research is visiting the setting where the novel takes place, and that always changes how I think of the novel, and somehow warms it up for me. For example, I had always thought of Kansas as completely flat, but around Lawrence, it is rolling and somewhat woodsy, so that changed the way that I thought of the Kansas troubles. For Horse Heaven, it was evident as soon as I started visiting racetracks that every horse racing culture was more or less unique, and that was intriguing to me.

Johnson: What’s your writing schedule like?

Smiley: Ad hoc, but regular.

Johnson: Do you ever read your work aloud? Do you have “first readers” who give you feedback on your work?

Smiley: Every day, I read what I wrote the previous day to my husband, who sometimes corrects, sometimes questions, and sometimes dozes off. This give me that chance to correct punctuation and spelling errors. Then I go on with that day’s work. I think this method is a good compromise between not obsessing but trying to be careful.

Johnson: What were some of the structural issues you faced in composing the scope of The Last Hundred Years?

Smiley: In every trilogy, volume two seems to balloon, because in volume one, the author explores a number of different characters, and those spawn more characters and events in volume two. This happened to me, too, I didn’t really want to give up any of my characters, or to push any off to the side, but I had to get off the farm and follow some of them into the world, so I chose to stick more or less with Frank and Lillian, while trying to keep up with the others as best I could. In volume 3, I focused on Frank’s children and Joe’s children, and the farm as a commodity. This was conscious. But I could certainly see how someone like Zola or Balzac would find himself writing a linked series of novels, following various characters into various worlds.

Johnson: Keeping track of characters, their physical attributes, and the minute details of their lives in The Last Hundred Years must have been a challenge. I know some writers keep notes and Post-Its tracking the lives of their characters, especially in such a large work. Did you use any visual aids or other methods to help you sustain the life of each character as you wrote her/him?

Smiley: None in particular. They were quite distinct in my mind almost all the time, but I did make sure that their names were distinct so that I wouldn’t get them mixed up. In other novels, like The Greenlanders, Moo, and Horse Heaven I have used charts to keep track of who was where and who was left behind.

Johnson: When you have a project that spans so much time and so many characters, how much do you know before you start writing? 

Smiley: I think this is instinctive. I research and research, and then I feel like I know the beginning, and I start. Then I do more research to see where things should go. I knew the general history of the US after 1920, but not much of the specific history, so I did a lot of research as the years passed.

Johnson: The trilogy is told in a third-person personal point of view. Does the point of view come to you in the writing or is it something you work out ahead of time when considering a novel?

Smiley: I wanted to jump around from character to character—to have most of the characters seen from outside and from inside, and also to have them get old and remember things incorrectly, so the POV came naturally to the idea.

Johnson: You’ve said that you were interested in the idea of dramatic things happening, but then the characters go on, that it can’t be drama all the time. Or rather, “What is drama to you is not drama to me.” What is drama to you?

Smiley: The same for me as everyone, probably—things that seem threatening or unusual or mysterious or that involve interpersonal conflict. But each of the characters would react to those things in a different way because they would experience them in a different way. For example, in Volume 1, Andy experiences her relationship with Frank very sharply, but others see them as more or less just a couple. She has been raised with an easily aroused sense of anxiety but it is somewhat disguised by her calm, Nordic demeanor. Her inner life is very alive, but at some point, someone says to Janet, “Your mother is like a plant.” So, Andy’s life is fraught with drama in her own experience, but she seems extra laid-back to others.

Johnson: What do you look for in the first pages of a novel and how did you decide on the beginning or opening chapter to Some Luck?

Smiley: Originally, the first chapter was from the baby Frank’s point of view, but when I went over it, I decided that it was too narrow and not understandable as an opening, so I switched the first Walter section with the first Frank section to give something of an overview. What I like in a first chapter is to get oriented, and to get a sense of where the novel is going. Sometimes I prefer narrative and sometimes I prefer dialogue. Depends on the purpose. For example, I love the opening of Pride and Prejudice and also of A Tale of Two Cities. Both are assertions rather than drama. But I also like to start with the landscape of the novel and the characters moving through it, as in La Cure, by Emile Zola or They Were Counted, by Miklos Banffy. Confessions are good, too, like the beginning of David Copperfield, because they befriend the reader.

Johnson: It’s interesting in writing a trilogy that you need to create three distinct novels that stand on their own, yet create a whole that also stands on its own. I imagine you zooming in and zooming out at many levels. Can you describe how you considered the interplay between the novels and the trilogy itself?

Smiley: I didn’t. I wanted volumes one and two to end in the middle of a sentence, and volumes two and three to take up where one and two left off, but my editor did not like that idea! So, I did my best to shape them into relatively self-sufficient books, but not as self-sufficient as those in some other trilogies. I conceived them as one thing, and then tried to make them more convenient than that.

Johnson: You enter the minds and experiences of men, women, and children of all ages and through experiences ranging from the learning to pick up a spoon and drop it, to sexual awakening, going to war, and building families and careers. How did you get yourself into these varying states of mind? Was there any character or situation that was most difficult to embody? 

Smiley: It starts with research and moves forward by means of empathy. I of course had some of these experiences and knew people who had had others of them, and so we talked about their experiences and compared notes. I also read a lot of first person accounts. I am an experienced gossip and eavesdropper, so that means I like to hear how people express themselves and imitate that. When Charles Dickens was young, he was very good at eavesdropping and putting what he heard into his books—maybe better at that than at actually understanding what he was getting at—he had to learn about psychology and structure after he learned about expression, but one led to the other. I think it is a same with most novelists.

Johnson: The Langdons are farmers in Iowa, and while some of them stay to farm the land, others leave to build lives in other parts of the country. What draws you to this setting and farming as the foundation for your characters’ lives?

Smiley: I lived there for a long time and I got quite interested in the idea of industrialized agriculture—what it meant to the farmers and what it meant to the American food system. It is not universal, but it is tempting, since farming is always a chancy game. I also grew up in St. Louis, home of Monsanto. I think that the verdict is still out on the safety of GMO foods, but the verdict is in on the very bad idea of Monsanto and other big agricultural companies owning and hoarding and monopolizing the means of food production. The way they do it has a long history of impoverishing farmers and the genetic treasury. They do a lot of research, but they are very short-sighted. In order for humans to survive, the food supply has to be malleable and the genetic information abundant and changeable according to circumstances—not Monsanto’s circumstances, but the local circumstances of the people growing and eating the food.

Johnson: In an article in The Atlantic, you said, “This unconscious power is often tapped through the act of description, and unexpected story revelations can spring out of the physical details of a scene.” Can you say more about how physical detail can lead you deeper into a story? 

Smiley: Just like people, characters react to the specifics of place and time. They might have a plan, for example, for plowing a field, but the weather conditions and the condition of the soil, or some little accident changes that plan. Just as we respond to these conditions and events according to who we are, so do characters. Some are patient, some are impatient, some are smart, some aren’t. The more you know as an author about the specifics of time and place, the more you can shape the narrative in a precise and interesting way. If Don Quixote hadn’t seen a windmill, he wouldn’t have tried to joust with it, and so he wouldn’t have been hurt, and so the entire book would have been different.

Johnson: You also said that when you completed A Thousand Acres you and Shakespeare were closer than ever. Can you say more?

Smiley: I knew that, like me, he had reworked existing material, and found the material to be more intractable than he’d expected it to be. I knew he had wrestled with the logic of the action and the motivation of the characters. I knew that there were places in the play where he had done the best he could to patch it all together. In short, I experienced my friend William Shakespeare as a fellow toiler in the literary muck. But as I pondered those points in King Lear where motivation became action and action resulted in reflection, I also learned that William Shakespeare and I were not soul mates, that I was a 20^th-century female and he was a 16^th-century male. He expected the world to be a crueler place than I did; he took for granted Lear’s claims as a king and as a man; his poetry voiced feelings and perceptions that were specific to his time and place. I learned that I could not, in fact, think like Shakespeare and that he did not, in fact, foresee our world. In short, when I followed Shakespeare into the Lear material, I discovered that he was human.

Johnson: What do you think makes for a good sex scene?

Smiley: Only the individual reader can say! For me, a sex scene is like any other scene—it has to reveal character, advance the plot, and the themes, and be specific to its setting. Sex is interesting only in so far as these characters are having sex for their own reasons, in their own ways, and with their own thoughts. Funny is good, too. Sex in real life often makes me laugh, so I like there to be laughs in the ones I read.  

Johnson: What do you look for in the end of a story or novel?

Smiley: The denouement is always an “unknotting,” so it depends on the novel. If the novel is a mystery, for example, then I want to know what really happened and why. If it is an exploration of a world, then I want one last image or the world, preferably large, but maybe small. If it is about relationships, then I want to know how they turned out, and how that effected the characters. It is hard to end a novel because there is no signal, like a curtain falling at the end of a play, so the author has to provide the signal that something has been resolved, but if the novel is very complex, then that resolution can’t really take care of all the issues. So, you have to do your best, decide whether it will be a crescendo or a diminuendo.

Johnson: What would you say to new writers working on their first books or stories?

Smiley: Be patient. You are a tortoise rather than a hare. You also cannot be a perfectionist, and you have to let your work get out into the world even if you are not really satisfied with it. If you redo it too many times, it will become very confusing, and rewriting will defeat its own purposes.

 

Sarah Anne Johnson is the author of The Very Telling, The Art of the Author Interview, and Conversations with American Women Writers. Her novel, The Lightkeeper’s Wife, was published in September 2014. sarahannejohnson.com.

 

EXCERPT

Excerpt from Some Luck

1920

Walter Langdon hadn’t walked out to check the fence along the creek for a couple of months—now that the cows were up by the barn for easier milking in the winter, he’d been putting off fence-mending—so he hadn’t seen the pair of owls nesting in the big elm. The tree was half dead; every so often Walter thought of cutting it for firewood, but he would have to get help taking it down, because it must be eighty feet tall or more and four feet in diameter. And it wouldn’t be the best firewood, hardly worth the trouble. Right then, he saw one of the owls fly out of a big cavity maybe ten to twelve feet up, either a big female or a very big male—at any rate, the biggest horned owl Walter had ever seen—and he paused and stood for a minute, still in the afternoon breeze, listening, but there was nothing. He saw why in a moment. The owl floated out for maybe twenty yards, dropped toward the snowy pasture. Then came a high screaming, and the owl rose again, this time with a full-grown rabbit in its talons, writhing, going limp, probably deadened by fear. Walter shook himself.

His gaze followed the owl upward, along the southern horizon, beyond the fence line and the tiny creek, past the road. Other than the big elm and two smaller ones, nothing broke the view—vast snow faded into vast cloud cover. He could just see the weather vane and the tip of the cupola on Harold Gruber’s barn, more than half a mile to the south. The enormous owl gave the whole scene focus, and woke him up. A rabbit, even a screaming rabbit? That was one less rabbit after his oat plants this spring. The world was full of rabbits, not so full of owls, especially owls like this one, huge and silent. After a minute or two, the owl wheeled around and headed back to the tree. Although it wasn’t yet dusk, the light was not very strong, so Walter couldn’t be sure he saw the feathery horns of another owl peeking out of the cavity in the trunk of the elm, but maybe he did. He would think that he did. He had forgotten why he came out here.

From Some Luck by Jane Smiley. Copyright © 2014 by Jane Smiley.
Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved.