Can't quit reality

What I discovered so far, reading novels, is that I'm no partial to fantasy. Reality is far more fictional and fantastic to me than human imagination. The grotesqueries and wild, labyrinthine conjurings can't compare with the delicate dynamics of human drama, the depths of evil, and life's capacity for good and renewal. The entire panorama of truth about reality engages like no other. That's why I can't put down Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, incidentally a Pulitzer Prize winner. It's a novel populated with real people talking in everyday language but all playing a role in a family story whose details sound so familiar and yet really exciting to know more about. Jane Smiley is the realist writer's novelist, if there must be one.

The deal here? A dose of reality – no, a booster shot: A vast corn field in Iowa. A family of four: a peremptory patriarch and his three daughters. Sir-yes-sir for an eldest. A jealous middle child. The youngest, the favorite. Plus, oh, a dead mother haunting everyone. A go-with-the-flow son-in-law with a hidden agenda. Another, a physically abusive man who killed his dream as musician in favor of farm life. Another who’s a snobbish lawyer and working out of town.

Then a few neighbors. Another patriarch, a friend of the father. His two sons: one who had evaded the draft (during the Vietnam War) and came back home, not exactly the prodigal son. Another who stayed put and obeyed orders like a good farm hand.

The thousand interesting details of farm life. Crops, farm tools, livestock, runoff management, kitchen products, farm chemicals. Then cancer, a string of miscarriages. Polluted well water! And naturally, organic farming.

Then dark family secrets. Generational sins, you could say, waiting to blow over. A whole town: pastor, police, church ladies, distant neighbors, all watching man’s capacity for evil stretched to its boundaries. Truths misinterpreted – the politics of truth.

All the four basic emotions are finely exposed – happiness, anger, fear, sadness – and needless to say, all the gray areas in between: lust, distrust, dislike, envy, hate, suspicion, betrayal, greed, scheming, malice, helplessness, hopelessness, despair, anguish, faithfulness, loss of faith, murderousness, jealousy, acquisitiveness/covetousness, blind ambition, longing, regret, deviant desires, love unconditional and conditional, friendship, fondness, the unreliable feelings of the senility, infidelity, desire to be free, desire to escape, restrained feeling.

So this is what a Pulitzer Prize winner means. Not a single page boring me to death. Devastating feelings, yet with the reader wanting the story to go on and on. The reader is successfully lured into sympathizing with morally divided beings, beautiful/ugly people. All depicted using a carefully controlled language (I spotted one misspelling and two grammatical errors, though).

How can I sleep off the night with a novel this good? I decided I’d just catch in daytime all the sleep I’d miss.