Inverarity is not a Scottish village

Greed and betrayal in the real estate boom of the 1980s.

Jane Smiley brings her extraordinary gifts, comic timing, empathy, emotional wisdom, an ability to deliver slyly on big themes and capture the American spirit, to the seductive, wishful, wistful world of real estate, in which the sport of choice is the mind game. Her funny and moving new novel is about what happens when the American Dream morphs into a seven-figure American Fantasy.

Joe Stratford is someone you like at once. He makes an honest living helping nice people buy and sell nice houses. His not-very-amicable divorce is finally settled, and he's ready to begin again. It's 1982. He is pretty happy, pretty satisfied. But a different era has dawned; Joe's new friend, Marcus Burns from New York, seems to be suggesting that the old rules are ready to be repealed, that now is the time you can get rich quick. Really rich. And Marcus not only knows that everyone is going to get rich, he knows how. Because Marcus just quit a job with the IRS.

But is Joe ready for the kind of success Marcus promises he can deliver? And what's the real scoop on Salt Key Farm? Is this really the development opportunity of a lifetime?

And then there's Felicity Ornquist, the lovely, feisty, winning (and married) daughter of Joe's mentor and business partner. She has finally owned up to her feelings for Joe: she's just been waiting for him to be available.

The question Joe asks himself, over and over, is: Does he have the gumption? Does he have the smarts and the imagination and the staying power to pay attention, to Marcus and to Felicity, and reap the rewards?

( Greed wasn't good. )

Verdict: Great writers don't always write great books. There is nothing about Good Faith I can call "bad," and evaluated purely for its craftsmanship, it's a fine novel. It just bored me. I'm sure it's someone's favorite, but I have a hard time imagining anyone falling in love with this book, frankly. Maybe someone who's really fascinated by social hijinks framed within 1980s real estate deals.

Also by Jane Smiley: My review of Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel.

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My complete list of book reviews.

A long, thorough study of the novel. If novels were a person, this book would be that person's biography.



Publisher's Description:

Over an extraordinary twenty-year career, Jane Smiley has written all kinds of novels: mystery, comedy, historical fiction, epic. “Is there anything Jane Smiley cannot do?” raves Time magazine. But in the wake of 9/11, Smiley faltered in her hitherto unflagging impulse to write and decided to approach novels from a different angle: she read one hundred of them, from classics such as the thousand-year-old Tale of Genji to recent fiction by Zadie Smith, Nicholson Baker, and Alice Munro.

Smiley explores—as no novelist has before her—the unparalleled intimacy of reading, why a novel succeeds (or doesn’t), and how the novel has changed over time. She describes a novelist as "right on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing," yet whose "job and ambition is to develop a theory of how it feels to be alive."

In her inimitable style—exuberant, candid, opinionated—Smiley invites us behind the scenes of novel-writing, sharing her own habits and spilling the secrets of her craft. She walks us step-by-step through the publication of her most recent novel, Good Faith, and, in two vital chapters on how to write "a novel of your own," offers priceless advice to aspiring authors.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel may amount to a peculiar form of autobiography. We see Smiley reading in bed with a chocolate bar; mulling over plot twists while cooking dinner for her family; even, at the age of twelve, devouring Sherlock Holmes mysteries, which she later realized were among her earliest literary models for plot and character.

And in an exhilarating conclusion, Smiley considers individually the one hundred books she read, from Don Quixote to Lolita to Atonement, presenting her own insights and often controversial opinions. In its scope and gleeful eclecticism, her reading list is one of the most compelling—and surprising—ever assembled.

Engaging, wise, sometimes irreverent, Thirteen Ways is essential reading for anyone who has ever escaped into the pages of a novel or, for that matter, wanted to write one. In Smiley’s own words, ones she found herself turning to over the course of her journey: “Read this. I bet you’ll like it.”

( 13 ways of looking at the novel and 101 novels to look at. )

Verdict: This isn't a light read, but it's a serious read for serious readers. If you like literary fiction and would like to consider yourself well-informed about it, I'd almost call it a must-read. There is a lot here to digest, but it's one of the few books that I think really will make you a better reader, and as a bonus, if you're one of the many serious readers who also entertains writing ambitions, there's a lot here for aspiring writers as well. Lastly, it contains 101 exceedingly well-written book reviews, so if you're one of those people (like me) who wishes you could write better book reviews (and maybe without great galloping hordes of teal deer and copypasta like I wrote above ;)), these might not be the style you aspire to, but they're certainly excellent examples.