"And yet we're totally Midwestern, by background and by education, and not only Midwestern, but Nordic, and WASP Midwestern, so there's all these seething undercurrents, but the closest we ever come to an argument is kind of a martyred sigh by the stove, followed by 10 years of not speaking. "The one quality that everyone in our family shares is irreverence," Smiley, 45, says later. In the Midwest, where the students, Smiley says, are "so respectful they're practically dead," this is a Turkish bath without towels. Why didn't Ginny and Rose, incest victims modeled on Goneril and Regan, get pregnant? Why was the opening so dry? Why is Ginny's vocabulary so sophisticated if she didn't go to college? What about readers who don't know "Lear"? The white lady in the thick glasses answers every one, without a drop of feeling, as if she's reading from a seed catalogue. The discussion devolves into a series of acutely knowing, and assiduous, challenges. Some have read Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "A Thousand Acres," and Shakespeare's "King Lear," its springboard. She is folded into a chair in the library at Banneker High School in Northwest Washington, surrounded by the predominantly indifferent faces of about 30 urban African American students. She is certainly beanpole, part antelope - her neck is long, her forearm longer, her thighbone practically infinite. She resembles not one but two breadbasket types: schoolmarm and farm girl.
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