摘要：

On a thousand acres, a person can bury a lot. In her thousand acres, all 371 pages of it, Jane Smiley buries objects and people, but also memories of good and evil, and mostly, it seems, of evil. Perhaps not surprisingly, the narrator, Ginny Cook Smith, buries the most, and so has the most to uncover or remember. Under the floor of the dairy barn, Ginny buries the bloodstained nightgown and underclothes of miscarriage number five (p. 255). Down the trash chute of the Savery Hotel in Des Moines, where she spends her honeymoon, she buries the washcloth she uses after sex – sex that does not reveal signs of her lost virginity (p. 279). In 'the heap of leaves and grass clippings beside the garden', she buries the ashes of the minced hemlock with which she poisoned a batch of canned liver sausage and sauerkraut (p. 313). And several years later, she buries the ground-up remains of the liver and sauerkraut by flushing them into the city sewer system (p. 366). But Ginny is not alone in burying stuff. 'In the country', she observes, 'trash has a way of attracting other trash', and people dumped what they no longer wanted in the gully between the Cook farm and the neighbouring Clark farm: 'a rusted-out automobile chassis, some steel drums, an old iron bedstead, a rusted-out truck bed with a broken-backed vinyl automobile seat in it, a roll of dark reddish brown barbed wire, and a cracked white ceramic toilet tank' (p. 122). The old stone quarry, which is 'manmade but natural, too' (p. 246), also attracts stuff – 'hubcaps, tin cans, bashed-in oil drums' (p. 247) – and even a car or two, as Ginny tells her brother-in-law Pete (p. 249). Some time later, drunk with rage and alcohol, Pete drives his own car into the quarry, drowning himself in the brown and murky water (p. 247), becoming something to be buried, and perhaps, one day, all but forgotten, as the faces of long-dead Cook ancestors are unrecognizable to Ginny's youngest sister Caroline, who thinks 'things generally are what they seem to be' (pp. 361-2). Also buried in the ground of Zebulon County are miles and miles of tile that keep the land from returning to the sea from which it was Textual Practice 19(2), 2005, 263–282

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