Good Faith - Hardcover

Smiley, Jane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375412174 ISBN 13: 9780375412172

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2003

Synopsis

Emerging from an ugly divorce in the early 1980s, real estate salesman Joe Stratford is reluctant to join his friend Marcus on a get-rich-quick scheme and wonders about the advances of a free-spirited married woman. By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres. 200,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

Jane Smiley's Good Faith, a novel about greed and self-delusion set in the economic boom of the early 1980s. Joe Stratford is an amiable, divorced real estate agent in an unspoiled small town called Rollins Hills. He takes it in stride when a married female friend pursues a love affair with him; he is more suspicious when a high-rolling newcomer named Marcus Burns begins to influence the business affairs of the men closest to Joe. Nevertheless, the promise of easy riches draws Joe into one of Burns's real estate development schemes, and then, ominously, into gold trading.

The steps by which a nice guy can be lured into betraying his principles are delineated so sharply in Good Faith that you wonder how Joe cannot see them. Although he never quite manages to understand what has happened to him, he's granted a moment of grace at the close of the novel, a second chance that has nothing to do with money, ambition, or the tarnished American Dream.

Since we live with the legacy of the self-serving 1980s, Smiley's novel seems as timely as if it were set in the present. Opening a Jane Smiley novel is like slipping into a warm bath. Here are people we know, places where we grew up. But the comforting, unassuming tone of her work allows Smiley incredible latitude as a writer, and her books are full of surprises. --Regina Marler, Amazon.com

Review:

Smiley's superb novel does for estate agency what the west wing does for politics... enthralling and sexy. --Mail on sunday

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0375412174
• ISBN 13: 9780375412172
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 417