Good Faith - Softcover

Smiley, Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385721056 ISBN 13: 9780385721059

Publisher: Anchor Books, 2004

Synopsis

Greed. Envy. Sex. Property. In her subversively funny and genuinely moving new novel, Jane Smiley nails down several American obsessions with the expertise of a master carpenter.

Forthright, likable Joe Stratford is the kind of local businessman everybody trusts, for good reason. But it's 1982, and even in Joe's small town, values are in upheaval: not just property values, either. Enter Marcus Burns, a would-be master of the universe whose years with the IRS have taught him which rules are meant to be broken. Before long he and Joe are new best friends--and partners in an investment venture so complex that no one may ever understand it. Add to this Joe's roller coaster affair with his mentor's married daughter. The result is as suspenseful and entertaining as any of Jane Smiley's fiction.

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:

"Smashing. . . . Fascinating. . . . Extremely subtle and nuanced. . . . [It has the] power to beguile and enthrall." --The New York Times Book Review

"There seems to be nothing Smiley can't write about fabulously well; her insights startle, dazzle." --San Francisco Chronicle

"An irresistible novel of bad manners, a meditation on love and money that Jane Austen might have enjoyed, if she could have handled the sex." --Time

"Everything about Good Faith is in perfect move-in condition. . . . [It] displays all the remarkable attention to detail that's the hallmark of Smiley's work. . . . Smiley has invested her best talent in this work, and you can buy it in good faith." --The Christian Science Monitor

"A vindication of the traditional American novel. . . . It depicts its disquiet by means of rich, seamless prose, scenic immediacy and tight plotting. It's a true winner." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Only a writer of consummate craftsmanship and scope could write a novel about a series of real estate deals in a small town and make it so fully satisfying as to be thrilling. Jane Smiley has done it. . . . [Her] range is broad, her technique masterful. . . . [Good Faith is] a cautionary prequel just right for our times. And great fun, to boot." --Los Angeles Times

"Natural, convincing and moving." --Chicago Tribune

"I admire this novel in so many ways I hardly know where to start. . . . The suspense Smiley generates is about on a par with a hundred Stephen King creatures coming out of the woods. . . . [Smiley] is one of our most Dickensian novelists, her imagination is prodigious, her observations exact, and the wealth of fascinating people inside her head a national treasure." --Donald E. Westlake, The Washington Post Book World

"Striking. . . . Well written, amusing." --The Wall Street Journal

"[A] lusty, testosterone-pumped tale, which both revisits Smiley's obsession with infidelity and underlines her remarkable ability to humanize an industry. . . . You're sucked in [by] this story's power." --Elle

"A literary property that will only appreciate over time." --Daily News (New York)

"Scathing, uproarious. . . . All of Smiley's characters have a sharp vigor that fuels the book's energy. . . . With its surprises and reversals, and its robust realism pushed step-by-step toward comic hyperbole, Good Faith affirms one's faith in the venerable virtues of the satirical novel." --The Seattle Times

"Smiley is never less than brilliant, and this is a clever, classy and utterly enthralling look back in I-told-you-so amusement." --Daily Mail

"Seductive. . . . Frisky. . . . Hilariously deadpan . . . a beguiling cautionary tale. . . . Like a sturdy, well-planned house, it makes room for everybody, and it ought to last a long, long time." --The Miami Herald

"With an arsenal of talents that seem equipped for everything from high drama to uproarious satire, [Smiley's] charm and versatility are outdone only by her narrative confidence." --The Boston Globe

"[Smiley] is so expert in the vernacular of real estate sales you feel like giving her a license by the end of the book. . . . [She] has imagined herself so deeply into [her protagonist] that we can almost feel the way the guy wiggles his toes in his black silk business socks." --Chicago Sun-Times

"Smiley's superb novel does for estate agency what The West Wing does for politics--make it, against the odds, enthralling and sexy. . . . Good Faith has some wonderfully funny characters and is wise and touching." --Mail on Sunday

"Captivating. . . . Tightly focused. . . . A major piece of literary property." --The Christian Science Monitor

"Precise and unshowy, Pulitzer Prize winner Smiley populates her fiction with convincing mothers, lovers, sons and sisters (not to mention houses), and there's real heart in this tale of a material world in the making. A high point in the genre of real-estate realism." --Harpers & Queen, Beach Read of the Month

"A wonderful exposition of a decadent decade." --Good Housekeeping

"Riveting. . . . Smiley has remained faithful to an ideal of sheer readability, to the Jamesian dictum that a novelist's principal task is to be 'interesting.' Her artistry in doing so, in populating her fiction with interesting characters doing equally interesting things, is camouflaged by how easy she makes it all look." --The New York Times Book Review

"Smiley's mastery of language and her talent for plot and character make this story resonate with meaning long after its supremely satisfying final page." --Sainsbury's Magazine, Book of the Month

"Entertaining. . . . Perceptive. . . . Although Smiley could make even Whitewater understandable, it's her characters--flawed, complex, totally convincing--who pull you through the pages. . . . Good Faith is on the money." --The Orlando Sentinel

"Smiley is as restless and uninhibited by her own creative history as a novelist can be. . . . She has set herself a new task with every book. . . . Her technical mastery of fiction--her genius for dialogue and for shades of character, her perfect control of events, and her ability to create suspense out of a snowflake's descent--has meant that all are admirable. . . . Good Faith has a new world to display and a new vocabulary for Smiley, with her usual miraculous powers of mimicry." --Daily Telegraph

"On-the-mark. . . . Superbly written. . . . A broadly funny book by someone with an unerring satirical sense and the ability to create wonderful characters." --Newark Sunday Star-Ledger

"The unassuming conversations, the faultless dialogue, the sheer ease with which the story progresses are of course Jane Smiley's strength, and it is considerable." --Anita Brookner, The Spectator

"[Smiley] is a gifted realist, able to capture the way things actually work and feel, from a high-level real estate transaction to a pool party circa 1983." --The New York Sun

"Smiley's new novel--written with her customary confidence, scale and assurance--may stand as an arresting development in what might one day look like a distinct genre of American turn-of-the-21st-century fiction, searching back to find the most recent wrong turning in the receding past." --Financial Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Anchor Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0385721056
• ISBN 13: 9780385721059
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432