Audio By Carbonatix
In 1991, author Jane Smiley presented A Thousand Acres, a modernization of King Lear that became a national bestseller and earned a Pulitzer Prize. Given the two-tiered success of this highbrow opus (nothing says “important” like Shakespeare), it would seem that Smiley’s natural inclination would have been to get even heavier in subsequent works. But instead, this woman of many contradictions confounded expectations by spending the past nine years on less forbidding fare. And now, with Horse Heaven, her latest novel, she’s gone to a place where few serious writers have gone before — a world in which readers are taken into the heads of creatures who get around on four legs, not two.Not that Smiley has ventured into Mr. Ed territory; none of her fictional nags talk in anything other than neighs and whinnies. Furthermore, these equine characters, including Justa Bob, a damnably intelligent sort who knows how to win by a nose, the terminally horny Epic Steam, and Mr. T., an aging gelding with an uncanny knack for calling winners, sport personalities that are every bit as rich as those demonstrated by human counterparts such as “animal communicator” Elizabeth Zada, crooked trainer/born-again-Christian Buddy Crawford and Tiffany Morse, whose journey toward horse ownership begins while she’s working at Wal-Mart. To Smiley, who shares three acres of Northern California land with a herd of horses that’s sixteen strong, this makes perfect sense.
“It’s so natural for horse people to try and figure out how their horses are thinking in order to understand how to deal with them that there was really no other way to write about them than the way I did,” she says. “It never occurred to me not to do it. I wanted to talk about how the horses got to where they were going, and in order to talk about that, you have to recognize that the horse is a full partner in the enterprise. So if you don’t make room for the horse’s opinion about things, then you aren’t going to get anywhere. The horse eventually will make his opinion known, and if you’re not sensitive to it in the beginning, he’ll make it known later on, and in a more forceful way.”
Since the publishing industry is as susceptible to branding as any business, even some critically acclaimed authors have chosen to stick with a single style; after all, it makes marketing easier. But Smiley has built change into her career via her decision to write one book in each of what she calls “the four major forms” of literature. Having accomplished that with The Greenlanders (an epic), A Thousand Acres (tragedy), Moo (comedy) and The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (romance), she had no restrictions, self-imposed or otherwise, when it came to Horse Heaven. Structurally, the tome resembles Moo; like that earlier effort, it features a huge cast, a narrative made up of scenes that occasionally intersect but often don’t, and a buoyant, sometimes absurd tone. But Smiley, who taught at Iowa State University for a decade and a half, sees the results as more akin to magical realism.
“That genre offers a kind of double perspective on things that seem impossible from one point of view but from another point of view are perfectly possible and logical,” she says. “For example, one of my favorite books is Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka, in which a guy turns into a bug. Now, this is supposedly impossible, and yet we read about it knowing that we’re going to learn something about what it is to be human from this story. And that’s what novels are for.”
Novels are supposed to be entertaining as well, and Smiley’s come to realize that the more fun she’s having when she’s writing, the more enjoyment a reader is likely to feel while reading. To that end, she’s eagerly at work on her next book, whose topic is sex.
“My mother doesn’t like the fact that I’m fiddling with this,” she concedes, laughing. “But what can I say, Mom? I’m fifty years old. I get to do what I want now.” — Michael Roberts