Joe Stratford, who sells nice houses in a beautiful place, and whose not very amicable divorce is over, is ready for his life to begin again. It is 1982, morning in America, and temptation is everywhere. And, as Marcus Burns (Joe's new friend from New York) says, the old rules are ready to be broken. Marcus should know: he's just quit his job with the tax man. But are his ideas about how to get rich - really rich - too big and risky for Joe? And what about the real estate development at Salt Key Farm: why is the local savings and loan so eager to lend Marcus and Joe the money for its asking price? And there's Felicity - the daughter of Joe's business partner - who has finally confessed how fond she is of Joe. But, Joe wonders, is this winning, free-spirited (already married) woman really the one he s been waiting for?Good Faith is an extraordinary story about ordinary people caught up in the exotic 1980s version of the American Dream - as greed and financial game-playing of the highest and newest order explode on Main Street. By turns poignant, insightful, and outrageous, it is Jane Smiley at her funniest and most slyly astute.
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
