At sixty miles per hour, you could pass our farm in a minute, on County Road 686, which ran due north into the T intersection at Cabot Street Road.

Plain-spoken and placed, A Thousand Acres begins. A story explicitly based on King Lear, down to the initials of many characters, but told from the viewpoint of Ginny (Goneril), A Thousand Acres is not a story of filial betrayal but of parental betrayal, cultural betrayal, a patriarchal society that makes life impossible for women, a male-farmed, polluted land that literally kills women - the gynaecological curses of Lear transformed into breast cancer and miscarriages - and the darker implications of Lear are brought forth into a graphic portrait of a parent still abusing his adult children. The novel functions both as a critical response to Lear and as a work in its own right, and is full of concrete detail: the land and customs of this part of Iowa are entirely self-contained, excluding other viewpoints in the novel and eclipsing the English background of the original play.

It's a bold thing to do: taking on Shakespeare is courting odious comparisons, and it's easy for a counter-reading of his play to come across as simplistic and didactic. The fact that Smiley succeeds is a remarkable accomplishment, and the fact that the novel can be read without needing to compare it to Lear is likewise impressive. A Thousand Acres is a gripping, eloquent and perceptive tale of a disintegrating family, and despite the long shadow of Shakespeare, it stands on its own substantial merits.

A novelist making such a bold move has limited space in which to set out her stall: if she doesn't look like she's going to do something intelligent with it in the first few pages, many readers will roll their eyes and cast the book aside. How does Smiley rise to this challenge?

The first thing that stands out about this sentence is its specificity: it speaks of locations ('County Road 686', 'Cabot Street Road') with an air of deep familiarity. Ginny knows these places - has known them all her life; they are the landmarks of her universe - and the lack of explanation with which she identifies them, simply saying her names, establishes her tone: she may describe the nature of her world when reflection upon it is important to her personal understanding, but she's not exactly speaking to an outsider. Or rather, she's not entirely speaking to us: we hear her, but the intimacy of place names gives us the sense of a voice that's almost speaking to itself, explaining herself to herself as an attempt to manage the enormity of events that will overtake her. She doesn't turn to address us; she thinks aloud, and we listen.

The place names themselves are also interesting - or rather, they're interestingly uninteresting. For a writer challenging Shakespeare, it's a gesture of immense confidence to give us a first sentence so full of boring phrases, almost an assertion of authority: Smiley is going to take her time establishing what she needs to establish and will not beg the reader's indulgence with linguistic bribes. The magnitude of Shakespeare doesn't cow her: this book will do what it needs to do for its own sake.

And what these names begin to establish straight away is the character of Ginny's culture. 'County Road 686' and the tautologous 'Street Road' are solidly literal-minded: whatever the beauties of the countryside, whoever named it - which is to say, whoever claimed and owned it, whoever had power over it - saw it as land to use, not to gaze upon. Names are functional, not evocative. Imagination will have little room to breathe here ... and with the disregard of imagination comes the disregard of doubt, of the right to question convention, of the emotional needs of those not powerful enough to impose their feelings on subordinates. Imagination is in short supply, and so, consequently, is empathy.

From a European perspective, at least, there's another layer to these names: they are comparatively modern. Roads have been built in an organised enough way to name them by number, for instance, rather than built and adapted and maintained higgledy-piggledy down the ages. Ginny will soon begin telling her family history, the dynasty that goes back a few generations to the purchase of land by great-grandparents. In other words, this literal-minded naming has been done by people still recent enough to exert a fairly direct line of influence, undiffused by the passage of centuries ... and it also gives us a family that's as limited in time as Ginny's world is in space. Three generations on record have preceded Ginny and her sisters: that is the family tree. With so few patriarchs to carry the load of history, each of them is proportionally magnified, ordinary men raised to the status of kings in their tiny realms. This world is temporally as well as geographically parochial, and force of personality will ring all the louder for it.

At the same time, Ginny's voice has a workmanlike ease with this use of language; note, for instance, the rural traveller's 'due north', a phrase for a land short on landmarks. She knows her way around, knows speeds and distances - and crucially, she speaks as part of the land. 'You could pass our farm': there us an us and a them, and she is firmly located as a member of this farm: for good and for ill, she is deep within her family.

What can we learn of this farm in the first sentence? We have a pretty good idea from the title that the farm is a thousand acres in total; when contrasted with the helpfully simple arithmetic of the first sentence - from the road, the farm looks only a mile wide - we have a sentence freighted with implication. A thousand acres can be mistaken, from the outside, for a mere mile of landone. In other words, an outsider who does not stop to look in more depth is going to underestimate the situation here: there is, literally, a thousand times vastly more than meets the eye. The farm is physically isolated - the main thoroughfare shows little of it - and that little is not enough to understand. The contrast between respectable appearance and the exploitation it covers, exploitation that the neighbours don't want to hear about because they prefer the respectable exterior, will be a driving force in the plot, and we are warned from the beginning. Removed from each other, people can put on conventional faces and do terrible things in the privacy of their far-flung homes, and nobody wants to hear about it.

The sentence, in other words, has complex layers of tone. As an authorial statement, it is a direct announcement to the reader: I'm writing this book the way I think it ought to be written, trust me or take your leave. As an establishment of Ginny's voice, however, it's full of ambivalence. She speaks to an outside 'you' while maintaining the lack of explanation one would expect of a voice speaking to itself, leaving us to wonder whether 'you' means us or a generic 'you' imagined by a woman trying to get some perspective on her microcosm. She notes the literal view of her farm with the quiet implication that an outside view will be wrong, both literally and metaphorically. And when we contrast this subdued insistence on looking deeper with the clanking simplicity of the place names, we begin to see a portrait of a culture that cannot speak for itself, cannot identify itself, cannot be trusted in any externals: a culture heading for disaster because those who own it overlook the vital, quiet truths that cannot be summed up in a number or a name.

A Thousand Acres is eloquent but simple, its language rooted and particular, its complexity lying in its implications rather than its sentence structure. And even in its first sentence we see those implications begin to shift and whisper, in the voice of a woman struggling to explain to herself complexities too deep and dark to ever fully understand, equipped only with the language her deep, dark, incomprehensible beginnings have given her.