Good Faith by Jane Smiley

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
Jane Smiley's twelfth book is a refreshing, quick-witted tale from an impressively talented author who routinely goes to great lengths to offer readers new styles and subject matter. This time out she takes on the 1980s in all their decadence and gluttonous glory -- and anyone who lived through the decade will shudder with recognition when encountering the novel's fully fleshed-out cast of characters. Dazzling and original, Smiley's narrative assembles elaborate plots and entices you into the circumstances with a masterfully supple voice that accurately captures the tone of the times. Reminiscent of the often ludicrous nature of high finance wheedling found in William Gaddis's satirical JR, Good Faith is an often thrilling, occasionally chilling, and altogether fascinating page-turner of a novel. Tom Piccirilli

From the Publisher

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.

The New York Times

As she's done in so many of her earlier novels, Ms. Smiley conjures up her characters' daily routines with uncommon skill, delineating the tidal flow of desire, disappointment and wishful thinking that informs their domestic and business lives. She shows us Joe's relationships with his picky, demanding clients — his hopes for a sale sometimes skidding into irritation, sometimes snowballing into a run of good luck — and she shows us the unexpected evolution of his romance with Felicity, as sex turns to love and love to frustration. — Michiku Kakutani

The Los Angeles Times

Only a writer of consummate craftsmanship and scope could write a novel about a series of real estate deals in a small town an hour and a half from New York City and make it so fully satisfying as to be thrilling. Jane Smiley has done it. — Jane Ciabattari

The Washington Post

The Penguin short biography series chose Jane Smiley to do Charles Dickens, and they were right. She is one of our most Dickensian novelists, by which I mean her imagination is prodigious, her observations exact, and the wealth of fascinating people inside her head a national treasure. In the past, she has observed her people at the racetrack, on the college campus, on the farm and in Greenland long long ago, among other places, and wherever she goes you'll want to go with her. This time, it's a small town in the mid-Atlantic states with a savings-and-loan in 1982, and you want to be there. Trust me on this. — Donald E. Westlake

The New York Times Sunday Book Review

For all of her serial genre-surfing, though, 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. — Paul Gray

Daniel Jones

[A] lusty, testosterone-pumped tale, which both revisits Smiley's obsession with infidelity and underlines her remarkable ability to humanize an industry. We're back in the '80s here-a heady, get-rich-quick orgy of junk bonds and megadeals in which he who hesitates loses...Good Faith has 'cautionary tale' written all over it-but you're sucked in [by] this story's power, [which] lies in the fact that it is less about lying or greed of friendship gone bad than about boldness versus caution and our American ambivalence about which is the virtue and which the vice.—Daniel Jones, Elle (May, 2003)

Ron Charles

With Jane Smiley's new novel, another prime parcel has come on to the market. There may not be a thousand acres here, but it's still a major piece of literary property. Everything about Good Faith is in perfect move-in condition...It's a manageable size, with just a small collection of expertly drawn characters...Tightly focused on a single real estate agent in a small New England town, Good Faith displays all the remarkable attention to detail that's the hallmark of Smiley's work...There's plenty of wit here, but this is a novel of admirable restraint. She doesn't want to satirize the gassy atmosphere that inflated markets and S&Ls to the breaking point. She wants to observe the moral effect of these lavish new dreams on ordinary human beings, and she does so with captivating insight and gentleness...Smiley has invested her best talent in this work, and you can buy it in good faith.— Christian Science Monitor (4/10/03)

Richard Lacayo

Jane Smiley has produced 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...Smiley, the Pulitzer prizewinning author of A Thousand Acres, knows something about land and the many ways it accrues value, sometimes just in the imagination. Her book is a wise comic tale about the ways in which money makes more substantial things-land, love, friendship-dematerialize. —Time (4/21/03)

Donna Seaman

Brilliant and versatile...Smiley has never been more seductive than in this acutely entertaining novel of big-time greed coming to a small East Coast town in the high-rolling 1980s...Smiley is fascinated by obsession and all the jargon and arcane knowledge associated with risky pursuits, and she expertly reanimates the mad and venal, not to mention illegal and disastrous, financial finagling that drove the money-mad, coked-up eighties, providing a thrilling rear-view mirror look at that notoriously covetous time. But this expertly crafted and subtly suspenseful tale is also notable for its exuberant eroticism: Smiley's sex scenes, and there are many, are truly ravishing. —Booklist (starred amd boxed review)

The New Yorker

Everyone trusts Joe Stratford, the affable Pennsylvania real-estate agent who narrates Smiley's ninth novel -- his clients, his bankers, his boss, his boss's sexy married daughter, and even the irascible contractor who builds the most beautiful houses in the county. But when Marcus Burns, a charismatic I.R.S. agent turned developer, comes to town, Joe feels that no one else understands his potential the way Marcus does. With Joe as his partner, Marcus soon seduces half the county into investing in a development venture that he says will make everyone rich. It is hard to imagine a novelist better suited to taking on the S. & L. scandals of the nineteen-eighties than Smiley, who has proved herself capable of writing about corruption in wildly different stylistic and moral registers ("Thousand Acres," "Moo"). Yet Joe's sense of who he has become is oddly muffled, a quality that infects the novel as a whole -- as if the author were unable to decide what, finally, her characters are guilty of, or how hard they deserve to fall.

Book Magazine

It's 1982, and Ronald Reagan is backslapping America, assuring us that we've become at last that shining city on the hill our Pilgrim fathers foretold. And the city, of course, is made of gold. At no time since the '20s has the American Dream seemed so money-fueled, and Wall Street insider traders, yuppies and multifarious entrepreneurs are all striving merrily to realize it.

Joey Stratford wants in, too. He just doesn't know it yet. At the start of Good Faith, Smiley's remarkable twelfth novel, he's a bit of a blithe innocent. Childless, recently divorced, fortyish, he's living easy as a small-town realtor. He nurses a wistful sadness for his first true love, the daughter of his business partner, Gordon Baldwin, killed long ago in a car wreck. Otherwise, everything's going well for Joey. Still, he feels a certain restlessness. As the gleaming decade heats up, Joey's ready for a new beginning.

Enter Marcus Burns, fresh from New York City, GQ-dapper and burnished with glad-handing, Tony Robbins–style confidence. Schemer, dazzler, charmer, Marcus in time will reveal himself as a Faustian tempter—and Joey's world will shake.

A novelist of astonishing range, Smiley retold King Lear in her Pulitzer Prize–winning A Thousand Acres and has written about matters as diverse as horse racing (Horse Heaven), mid-nineteenth-century prairie derring-do (The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton) and fourteenth-century Scandinavia (The Greenlanders). Strong narrative and realistically vulnerable characters mark her fiction, as does a wickedly funny stripe—best displayed in Moo, her academic novel set in anagricultural college.

With Good Faith, she's penned a cautionary tale of the perils of capitalism, a fable reminiscent of the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Smiley shares with Fitzgerald a fascination with moneymakers—and a distaste for the ways they sometimes make it big. In Good Faith, she captures exactly the '80s zest for moneymaking, the sense that anything, fortuitously touched, can be made to glisten. Gordon, for example, is a home builder by trade, but he's also a sort of free-form capitalist. He buys and sells everything, from toilets to houses to livestock: All form part, he insists, of a joyous cycle of consuming. "One thing leads to another," he says. "Houses lead to commodes, and then commodes lead to houses, which lead to land, which leads to dairy cattle, which leads to cheese, which leads to pizza pies, which lead to manicotti and veal Parmesan, which lead to wine, which leads to love, which leads to babies, houses and commodes."

Gordon's gluttonous way with money is boyish, up-front, unabashed. And it's creative; he uses cash to build and expand. Marcus, however, is the soul of pure greed—he wants money for money's sake, and by any means necessary. With his equally glossy sister, Jane, he conspires to enlist Joey and Gordon in a brilliant venture—buy up a renowned old estate and use its acreage as basis for a subdevelopment, the grandeur of which has never heretofore been imagined. The potential profits? Not millions, Marcus exults. Billions!

Now Gordon's no fool, and Joey, Smiley's convincing Everyman, is, while avaricious enough, unimaginative. He may have outgrown his too-neat, single guy's condo, but he doesn't aspire to castles. Indeed, to the townsfolk, he's a regular good guy—if not quite so pious as his parents, for whom any form of keeping up with the Joneses, or overtaking them, smacks of sinful pride. In part, Joey shares their values, but he chafes at their lack of ambition.

Marcus, a former IRS honcho, wins Gordon over by erasing the latter's tax problems; Joey is more cunningly seduced. Even before Marcus teases him with tickets to the big time, however, Joey has begun testing his wings by plunging into an affair with Felicity, the married sister of the girl for whom he'd mourned. That the tryst seems guilt-free doesn't bode well for Joey. And thJoey so obviously needs it underscores Marcus's gifts both for reading character and for scamming—ultimately he zeroes in on Joey's loneliness and suckers him by offering "friendship."

The suspense in the novel doesn't lie in our uncovering Marcus's villainy or in waiting for the real estate speculation to explode. He's patently a slickster, and the deal screams danger. Rather, what's intriguing is the good faith that Joey and Gordon first lavish upon the suspicious stranger—trust bred of equal parts backwater naïveté and starry-eyed optimism—and our witnessing that good faith erode.

When Marcus's malfeasance is at last exposed, Joey's wallet is seriously depleted. The very faith he and Gordon had offered their betrayer, Joey attempts to reason, was perhaps itself too tempting for Marcus to resist. After all, you can't fault a thief when your door is left unlocked.

That "good faith" is a game for chumps is a terrible irony and the book's harsh message. With it Smiley indicts the Reagan years entire. Even while she suggests a chastened future for Joey, she neatly, wittily stifles any nostalgia for the Age of Greed. In doing so, Smiley reveals herself as one of the most traditional of novelists, one not afraid of making a point, or of ending a story with a well-found moral.

Publishers Weekly

Smiley's range as a writer is always surprising. Eschewing both the tragic dimension of A Thousand Acres and the satiric glee of Moo, her 12th book is a clever and entertaining cautionary tale about America's greedy decade of the 1980s. Narrator Joe Stratford is a genial, well-liked realtor in a small New England town who's respected for his honesty; even his divorce was friendly. When smooth-talking Marcus Burns comes to town, fresh from a decade working at the IRS, where he's learned how to manipulate the law to avoid paying taxes, he convinces Joe and other decent but na ve people that it's never been easier to get rich quick. Marcus envisions a multi-use golf club and housing development. With the help of the conniving president of the local S&L, he easily finds money to purchase Salt Key Farm, a beautiful estate on 580 acres. The reader knows that the bubble will burst, but not how or when; frissons of suspense keep building as Smiley describes the fine points of land assessment, soil evaluation, loan applications and permit hearings in surprisingly riveting detail. Joe's personal life, too, is a tightrope walk. He's having an affair with a married woman, Felicity Baldwin, the daughter of his mentor, Gordon. When that cools, he takes up with another woman who seems perfect, but who turns out to be as devious as Marcus. What makes the story beguiling is Smiley's appreciation of the varieties and frailties of human nature. Every character here is fresh and fully dimensional, and anybody who lived through the '80s will recognize them-and maybe themselves. 200,000 first printing. (Apr. 28) Forecast: Only readers seeking the emotional wallop of A Thousand Acres will be disappointed by this lively tale, written with literary finesse. Booksellers can bet on a bestseller. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Pulitzer Prize winner Smiley once again opens a convincing fictional window on an American subculture. In her last novel, Horse Heaven, it was thoroughbred racing; this time around, it's financial speculation in the early 1980s. Successful small-town realtor Joey Stratford is divorced, at loose ends, and ready to pursue prosperity on a larger scale. New acquaintance Marcus Burns, a former IRS man lately arrived from New York, offers the chance of Joey's lifetime. The well-connected Marcus seems to know all the angles of developing and profiting massively from a fabulous local property, Salt Key Farm. Joey, at once dazzled by Marcus and distracted by an intoxicating affair with the sister of a high school sweetheart, proceeds with his investment, though he suspects that the Salt Key project may be very risky business. Marcus's schemes play out in a tragicomedy featuring a Dickensian mix of quirky characters chasing their versions of the American dream. Smiley's amusing plot is charged with energy, her sense of time and place is on target, and her research into the ways and means of real estate development is seamlessly integrated. This absorbing book will appeal to a wide variety of readers. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/02.]-Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Product Details

• Interviews & Essays
• Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt

Interviews & Essays

Reading Group Guide

1. Having given Joe Stratford the role of narrator, Smiley gives her readers a great deal of access to Joe’s thoughts. What difference does it make that the novel is narrated in first person rather than third? Why does Smiley give us the story from Joe’s perspective?

2. What kind of a person is Joe? What does he think about himself, his marriage to Sherry [pp. 15–16], and his life? How accurate are his judgments about himself and other people?

3. Look closely at a couple of scenes in which Felicity and Joe are alone together. What specific details of Smiley’s writing style affect the reader’s experience of their love affair? Does Felicity love Joe? Does he love her? If he does, why does he not pursue her more actively?

4. Discuss the main elements of Felicity’s character. What is admirable about her? To what degree is she a typical dissatisfied homemaker motivated by boredom and restlessness? Is she playing a game with Joe for her own amusement? How important is the conversation between Felicity and Joe in which she tells him, “You do tempt me to find the limits of your kindness” [see pp. 141– 43]?

5. What do secondary yet vibrant characters like the Davids, Gottfried Nuelle, and George Sloan contribute to the novel’s world? Do they create a sense of realism? Are they there for comic relief? How important is humor in Smiley’s writing?

6. In what sense is Jane Smiley interested in exposing certain truths about small-town, middle-class America? What points does Good Faith raise about how ordinary people respond when they seem to see a chance to increase their wealth and raise their socialstatus? What social concerns might have motivated Smiley to take on a novel about the 1980s? How is the present social climate different, and how is it similar, to those greedy years?

7. Is Joe a man who is looking for others to tell him what to do? Consider the descriptions of his relationship with Sally Baldwin and with his ex-wife Sherry. Consider his relationship with Marcus, and with Felicity. Is passivity a major flaw in Joe? Might it be considered a part of his charm?

8. What effect has Joe’s upbringing had on his character? Discuss his relationship with his parents and his rejection of their religious life. How strong a sense of ethics does Joe have? At what point, if any, does he begin to act and think more like Marcus?

9. How does Smiley present Marcus Burns, and how does she develop his character? What are his attractive qualities? Does Smiley imply that Marcus had talents that were somehow misdirected? What propels him into criminality?

10. What is Marcus’s appeal to Joe? On what is their friendship based? On page 413 Joe describes the after-effects of Marcus’s betrayal and wonders why, since Marcus had already received the money from the loan, he also took Joe’s savings. What might have been Marcus’s reason for delivering this deeply personal blow to Joe’s self-esteem?

11. Is this novel concerned more with character or with plot? To what degree is the element of surprise important to the story? Is there a sense of inevitability about what is going to happen to Joe, and to Joe’s money? If so, how does this affect the reading experience? What, if anything, is surprising about the final chapters?

12. The novel raises interesting questions about real estate development, the value of the countryside, and one’s sense of place. Can you infer Smiley’s feelings about the widespread transformation of the American landscape during such periods as the 80s? What human emotions drive the forces of change?

13. Is it surprising that central characters like Joe, Gordon, and Felicity escape prosecution? What conclusions can the reader draw from Felicity’s involvement with Marcus and Jane?

14. Is it surprising that central characters like Joe, Gordon, and Felicity escape prosecution? What conclusions can the reader draw from Felicity’s involvement with Marcus and Jane?

Read an Excerpt

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Excerpted from Good Faith by Jane Smiley Copyright© 2003 by Jane Smiley. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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