Understanding Jane Smiley

In this comprehensive study of Jane Smiley’s fiction, Neil Nakadate offers insight into the strikingly imaginative and intellectual range of a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer best known for A Thousand Acres. He provides close readings – from the early Barn Blind to The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton – and presents the first extended account of the connections between her life and her work.

Drawing on the critical record, previously unpublished interviews with the novelist, and Smiley’s own prolific commentary on literature, writing, and American culture, Nakadate examines her intellectual interests, social and philosophical concerns, and penchant for taking up different creative challenges with successive books. He traces the ongoing themes of her work, including those of family, environmental integrity, social institutions, economic and political dynamics, and the efforts of women to recover their identities in an often harsh and unreceptive world.

Questioning the tendency to identify Smiley’s writing as midwestern or as domestic realism, Nakadate contends that her fiction is a discourse on — and across — all American culture and that her oeuvre includes writing that, as with her comic novel Moo, departs from family-related themes.