Ordinary Love and Good Will: Two Novellas by Jane Smiley

My rating: 5 of 5 stars




See, this is what a good author can do, lead you from what you know so well you would never even notice it to the utter mystery of what you are, what your life is.

In Ordinary Love and Good Will, Smiley begins with a story of a homecoming, and we see a family working through the strains of reuniting with loved ones. The peculiar estrangements we feel when meeting people we once knew well, after an interlude of distance and vastly different experiences, form the emotional climate. And then, in that sort of ticking-bomb-way that family get-togethers have at Jane's house, an old, buried secret comes to light.

Smiley is an expert at examining the desire in life--you know, that big rock in your gut that nobody ever teaches you how to talk about, much less live with. The negotiation of duty and appetite creates the framework, or more, the vehicle of our travel, forward into the unfolding years, backwards into our puzzling pasts, down our familiar neighborhood streets to places from which we never come back. What seems the most surprising in the end, as always, is love--its power, its failing, what we love, that we love--if that's what it was, was that love?

In the second story, Smiley builds on these themes with a narrative that somehow enacts the limits of self-perception. This is an astounding piece of writing that presents a character living a disciplined and carefully controlled life off the grid, who in spite of his best efforts is unable to avoid the unscripted aspects of marriage, fatherhood, and self-awareness. He is a complex man, who builds things, who prides himself on seeing beauty in things, who comes to discover a beauty he has resisted, a way of being that is the only right relation to the inescapable grief of life.

I have always had a tendency to snub domestic fiction. My knee-jerk reaction to stories about families is a combination of boredom and claustrophobia. But in Smiley's capable hands, what seems at first mundane, ho-hum, becomes the jumping off point for journeys I seem ready now to make, into realms of hardship and adventure not sketched on any map, a territory known only as the human heart.




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