AUTHOR JANE SMILEY IS A LITERARY POWERHOUSE, and your neighbor. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, in her early 40s, for A Thousand Acres, her fifth novel, published in 1991. Before this modern take on King Lear was turned into a 1997 movie starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Smiley moved to Monterey County, where over 20 books more – family sagas, mysteries, young adult novels and nonfiction – came into being.
Sometimes, this sense of place is featured explicitly. “The other day, when I was walking in Monterey,” she wrote in the introduction to her newest book, a 2023 collection of essays titled The Questions That Matter Most,“and I left the Del Monte Shopping Center for Don Dahvee Park I saw a path that I’d never taken before and it took me straight into the woods, along the creek, natural, chaotic and messy, not half a mile from designer handbags at Macy’s.”
But who is this tall, graceful woman, now 73 and still publishing, who lives and runs her errands among us and has been ever-present on the book market since the 1980s? She intrigues because she is calm and patient, of rather sunny disposition, churning out a book every couple of years, no drama necessary.
If Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope are her favorite male writers, Joyce Carol Oates (a decade older than Smiley, and still an active writer), as well as Alice Munro (two decades older, still living) are her sisters-in-letters. Like them, Smiley is the master of the family psyche, the community psyche, and human relationship analysis.
Before moving to Carmel Valley Smiley was already the author of Barn Blind (1980), her debut novel about a woman who loves horses, as well as her first family drama, At Paradise Gate (1981), and her first mystery, Duplicate Keys (1984). Add to that the two books of novellas and stories, as well as her first nonfiction book, about artisans of the Catskill Mountains (in the ’80s, when she had a house in the Catskills, Smiley joined a quilting club there, fascinated by the voices and stories of local women).
Then we have big “rural” novels – The Greenlanders (1988), A Thousand Acres (1991) and Moo (1995) – all of which hold iconic positions in the Smiley canon. While it’s the second that earned her the Pulitzer, the first (a rural family saga that skillfully imagines the end of medieval Greenland) elevated Smiley beyond the realm of American readership, and the third – a rural novel again, but so different – is probably the best testimony of Smiley’s talent as a rather kind social satirist.
From here, we could move through Smiley’s active 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century that brought more novels and a biography of Dickens, the 9/11 crisis – and ensuing writer’s block – resolved by reading 100 novels as described in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), and more fiction, all that while teaching writing for years at the college level, first in Iowa, then in California.
But the truth is that if you are new to reading Smiley, you should start from the tail end, because there are plenty of brand-new Smiley books to choose from. Her horse-in-the-city fantasy Perestroika in Paris (2020), a 19th-century Monterey-based thriller A Dangerous Business (2022), and her just-released collection of mostly previously published – but mostly unknown – essays, The Questions That Matter Most: Reading, Writing, and the Exercise of Freedom (2023). (You can read an excerpt on p. 22.)
If you live in Monterey County, A Dangerous Business is the obvious place to start, perhaps even to physically track the movements of Eliza and Jean, Monterey prostitutes who take on a serial killer. For local readers, there’s a profound satisfaction in reading about the place: “When she [Eliza] was about a block above the side street where the lawyer lived, she saw him round the corner and head down Jefferson, walking steadily but slowly, not looking around, evidently without any suspicions. Eliza followed him. He entered Colton Hall through a back door.”
A Dangerous Business is the second Smiley novel set in California, and her first in Monterey County. The first was A Private Life (2010), a story based partially on her own family history and set in the San Francisco Bay Area. This history of a Missouri woman who ended up in California is not unlike Smiley’s, who was born in L.A. then grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis, in a landscape that couldn’t be more different from Carmel Valley.
SMILEY’S HOME PROVIDES ENVIABLE VIEWS OF THE CARMEL VALLEY – old trees, mild hills and pieces of blue between them. The long living and dining room is full of art pieces, many of them horse-themed, and there’s also a brown rocking horse in the corner. In addition to writing, knitting and horse-loving, Smiley is an avid art collector, who buys from local artisans. She writes in a chair with a movable desk, while her actual desk looks like a publisher’s table, with stacks of books on it, many of them her own. She is accompanied by Abby, a Labradoodle named after Abby Foss, who used to run the stables at Holman Ranch for a long time.
She says she picked Carmel Valley when looking for a perfect home for her first racing horse, Mr. T, who wasn’t happy in Iowa, where Smiley lived until 1996.
“It’s a bubble,” she says, sitting at her dining table, made by an artist she likes. Her long hair is a few tones whiter than the knitted ivory sweater Smiley made herself. “The weather is almost always beautiful. Just look at the views by my windows.”
In this “bubble,” with breaks for horse rides and such, Smiley has created a significant percentage of her impressive inner universe with so many galaxies – the hundreds and hundreds of characters that populate her novels.
When Smiley writes in her writing chair, time collapses, space distorts – Eliza and Jean are tracking bodies on the Monterey Peninsula, Queen of Navarre and Shakespeare’s Desdemona are pen pals, and Hauk Gunnarsoon hunts for walrus and narwhals.
After her newest works were released – the locally set book, A Dangerous Business, and her essay collection, TheQuestions That Matter Most – the Weekly sat down with Smiley. While the latter indulges many readers’ curiosities, we still had more questions.
Weekly: What’s your emotional relationship with your fictional characters like?
Smiley: It differs from novel to novel. For example, with The Last Hundred Years trilogy, I felt like I was in a car train with this very large family. And they were doing all the talking and I was just writing it down. I was exploring them best I could by eavesdropping on them.
If there was a big fire in the library of the world, and you could take in your arms and save only a few Jane Smiley books, which would you save?
I would rescue Moo. I would rescue The Greenanders, A Dangerous Business. I would rescue 10 Days In The Hills [2007] so that people in the future would know that we actually had sex. I would also like to rescue The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton [1998, a romance that includes American disputes about slavery and racism].
So all fiction and all adult fiction. And if you could be remembered only by one novel?
The first word that pops in my mind is Moo.
The connection between horses and female freedom was obvious to me since I learned that my childhood feminist hero, Pippi Longstocking, kept a horse on the porch. You were one of those girls who badly wanted a horse. Then you took a break from riding, but came back after becoming a successful writer.
It’s an odd story. We lived in Ames, Iowa but we had a summer house in Wisconsin. I was driving through the woods with my son, who was then 9 months old. I saw a sign that was pointing to a stable, we stopped and I watched this man giving riding lessons. That woke me up. So I did what I often do, which is to act on impulse. The next day I took a lesson. Two days later, I bought the horse.
That was the horse who “chose” Carmel Valley as his home. You tried racing and you tried breeding.
I didn’t earn any money, but I wrote a lot of books about it. Yes, that was the horse, Mr. T., but also my then-husband was from Iowa and he vowed not to die there.
We discovered Carmel Valley. It was great. For me, it has always been about riding, but also understanding the nature of horses.
As a person who writes adult fiction, YA fiction and nonfiction, you must have different groups of readers.
Various readers, who often pick up a particular book. And that’s fine. I wrote eight YA novels. Five are about Abby, a 14-year old whose family has horses near Salinas. And Ellen, from other books, is even younger. She lives in P.G. and her family doesn’t have space for a horse.
Are you done with any literary form? What’s your attitude on poetry?
I’m probably pretty much done with short stories and novellas. I prefer novels. A novel is a prolonged analysis of something. Poetry is there to give you a little zap. I actually wrote a poem in 1970 that I still like. I’ll read it to you after the interview. [The Weekly agreed not to republish the poem; despite being read aloud, Smiley says she might or might not publish this poem.]
I know you are very fond of Dickens and Trollope. Who’s your favorite female writer?
Jane Austen. But I had to read it on my own, just like Middlemarch [by George Eliot]. Our school was very much based on English literature. Some American novels, but very few female novels. Our house was about a mile from the public library and I would just walk there and hang out there.
One of your horses – real and fictional – is named Perestroika. What do you think about the attacks on the Russian novels and everything Russian as inherently imperial and negative? Naturally, the Russo-Ukrainian conflict is the context.
If you want to learn about the history of a particular culture, it’s important to read their fictional literature. Because fiction is about what it feels like to live in that culture.
When we were in high school, we had to read Dostoyevsky. I remember being just shocked at some of the things that were happening. When I was going to high school in the 1960s, we were terrified of the Russians. But I was learning what it was like to be a Russian person, not a boss or a king, but just a regular person living in Russia. And Dostoyevsky was really good at portraying horrors of daily life.
Some literary giants, such as Milan Kundera, but also American philosopher Richard Rorty, saw the novel as a quintessentially European form whose rise is parallel with the rise of modern Western democracy. Comments?
In the old days, there had to be printers, makers, people who made some money. If you had all those things, people in the society would all have access to novels and learn from them. So I wouldn’t say that the novel is specifically European, but the novel developed along the schools and newspapers. In those places where the newspaper never came to be, novels were very late coming. But yes, people who read novels, especially from the past, their mind opens up, and they become not only more understanding of those people, but also more certain about what they think is right and what should happen. And it gives you access to a lot of different points of view.
You’ve been observing the novel market for decades. Is it a good or a bad time for the novel?
It’s always changing. All forms of art are changing. For example, right now there’s a trend to make movies into miniseries. And that makes sense because in the movie, the original book is squashed down. I’m hopeful. Because when Jane Austen published, her books were expensive, but then Dickens and Trollope started to publish serialized novels and bring them to the masses.
Speaking of crises. You reported on one after 9/11 [described in a 2005 nonfiction volume, Thirteen Ways to Look At The Novel, in which you recount reading 100 novels]. Nothing since then in America gave you writer’s block?
9/11 was a shock. And once we went through that shock, the other shock wasn’t as much of a shock. So when You Know Who showed up, we would just think: “Oh yeah.”
So you published a charming novel, Perestroika in Paris, about a horse on the run in Paris.
[Laughs.]Yes, that was my attempt to distract people from the Trump presidency.
Do you like all the characters you create?
Some of the characters I like a lot. For example, Eliza [from A Dangerous Business]. As soon as I understood that she would rather work as a sex worker in Monterey than to go back home and live with her family [Covenanters, an ultra-observant religious sect] in Michigan, I thought: “Yeah, I really like her.”
Why didn’t she end up with the Irish guy?
Liam? Oh, you know, he was Catholic. [Laughs.] He was shy. He knew that he was in a precarious position. And anyway, I wanted for Eliza to get to Monterey
But before we let you and Eliza go, give us your Monterey County “likes.”
Just driving around the Peninsula feels like you are always in a new spot. The other day we were driving to Henry Miller Library and we were gaping at the scenery. I like local art galleries. I like Garland [Ranch Regional Park], I like Palo Corona, especially that mysterious valley behind the Inspiration Point. I’m not a big ocean person, but I like Ribera Beach. It’s like living in a paradise.
And people are nice and everybody has something funny to say. When I talk to people who live elsewhere, part of me always thinks: How could you not want to live here? And then another part says (theatrical whisper): No, no, we don’t want more people to come here.