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Good Faith
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres comes a “smashing...fascinating” novel ( The New York Times Book Review ) that conjures all the American obsessions of the 1980 sex, greed, envy, real estate, and the American dream.
In her subversively funny and genuinely moving new novel, Jane Smiley nails down several American preoccupations 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 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.
In her subversively funny and genuinely moving new novel, Jane Smiley nails down several American preoccupations 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 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.
432 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
85 people are currently reading
1297 people want to read
About the author
Jane Smiley
133 books2,708 followersJane Smiley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist.
Born in Los Angeles, California, Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and graduated from John Burroughs School. She obtained a A.B. at Vassar College, then earned a M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. While working towards her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar. From 1981 to 1996, she taught at Iowa State University. Smiley published her first novel, Barn Blind, in 1980, and won a 1985 O. Henry Award for her short story "Lily", which was published in The Atlantic Monthly. Her best-selling A Thousand Acres, a story based on William Shakespeare's King Lear, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. It was adapted into a film of the same title in 1997. In 1995 she wrote her sole television script produced, for an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street. Her novella The Age of Grief was made into the 2002 film The Secret Lives of Dentists.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), is a non-fiction meditation on the history and the nature of the novel, somewhat in the tradition of E. M. Forster's seminal Aspects of the Novel, that roams from eleventh century Japan's Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji to twenty-first century Americans chick lit.
In 2001, Smiley was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Born in Los Angeles, California, Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and graduated from John Burroughs School. She obtained a A.B. at Vassar College, then earned a M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. While working towards her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar. From 1981 to 1996, she taught at Iowa State University. Smiley published her first novel, Barn Blind, in 1980, and won a 1985 O. Henry Award for her short story "Lily", which was published in The Atlantic Monthly. Her best-selling A Thousand Acres, a story based on William Shakespeare's King Lear, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. It was adapted into a film of the same title in 1997. In 1995 she wrote her sole television script produced, for an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street. Her novella The Age of Grief was made into the 2002 film The Secret Lives of Dentists.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), is a non-fiction meditation on the history and the nature of the novel, somewhat in the tradition of E. M. Forster's seminal Aspects of the Novel, that roams from eleventh century Japan's Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji to twenty-first century Americans chick lit.
In 2001, Smiley was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 347 reviews
December 1, 2008
Don't know why I'm giving this five stars, except that this novel was like an addiction. It wasn't life-altering, nobody dies, nothing blows up. But any time I wasn't reading this, all I could think was, "When can I read Good Faith? When can I read Good Faith?"
June 9, 2015
Of all the Jane Smiley books I've read, this was difficult to finish or like. I disliked every character, the plot was too real, the ending obvious.
There are things about being a normal human in a small town that while perfectly everyday and natural, have always filled me with profound disgust. It's a tone of self-satisfied family life coupled with middle-class beautiful home graspiness and greed, accompanied by respectable social club conformity. It feels like a Republican Party caucus, before they included the deranged, apocalypse-believing (not only the religiously defined destruction of all), haters of difference, the kind of folks who defined America in the 1950's. It is a tribute to Smiley that she nailed those aspects perfectly.
Although the book occurs around 1982 and has as the main story a plot about how a bunch of small town businessmen, mostly real estate salesmen and bankers, become involved with property and stock market speculation, it is also about how the seduction of the con underlies supposedly honest entrepreneurship (I suspect marriage, being a legal, contracted relationship is included). Since I first became aware of how some are attracted by these forms of dishonest gain, I have always been revolted by it. I have never been able to finish watching movies or tv episodes about any kind of cons, even the ones so admired by Hollywood, and the Academy Awards. I can't stand game shows, either, for they also have that whiff of suspended self-respect and honor in pursuit of beating the con, the crooked game, for a gain which smells of too much greed and suspension of fairness. Everyone likes to win, but the feel of a self-compromising win feels awfully slimy to me, unbearably so. This kind of con is a real life selling of one's soul to a flesh and blood devil. If reporting a con makes you look bad because it is obvious you were trying to be dishonest and cheat someone yourself, no matter if it is legal or its appearance of safety, then you have bit a piece of the apple from Eden and you have no right to any supposed moral superiority.
There is no uncompromised character in this novel, but one. He is a construction worker that the others dislike working with because he values quality and esthetics over tawdry, of-the-moment style and flashy distractions. A number of characters literally and figuratively lose themselves because of siren calls to Desire of various false 'winning' situations, which actually come about from existing faults within each fallen antagonist. While I admire the expertise of the author's subtle outing of each character's flaw that shows the self-inflicted inner rot and the less than admirable, but ordinary, business of town life, it was obvious to me how the story would end. (A name like 'Burns' is a clear clue, as perhaps 'Mark-us'). All of these characters were so obviously, to me, corrupt behind their small world businesses that whatever usually pulls me into stories was missing. No one possessed any honor or worthy goals, except for the one 'carpenter' character, and he was not someone I liked much because he was so unbending.
As representing real life, the book is a five star winner, but as a novel to spend time reading, it's like eating stale cake while reading the Old Testament.
There are things about being a normal human in a small town that while perfectly everyday and natural, have always filled me with profound disgust. It's a tone of self-satisfied family life coupled with middle-class beautiful home graspiness and greed, accompanied by respectable social club conformity. It feels like a Republican Party caucus, before they included the deranged, apocalypse-believing (not only the religiously defined destruction of all), haters of difference, the kind of folks who defined America in the 1950's. It is a tribute to Smiley that she nailed those aspects perfectly.
Although the book occurs around 1982 and has as the main story a plot about how a bunch of small town businessmen, mostly real estate salesmen and bankers, become involved with property and stock market speculation, it is also about how the seduction of the con underlies supposedly honest entrepreneurship (I suspect marriage, being a legal, contracted relationship is included). Since I first became aware of how some are attracted by these forms of dishonest gain, I have always been revolted by it. I have never been able to finish watching movies or tv episodes about any kind of cons, even the ones so admired by Hollywood, and the Academy Awards. I can't stand game shows, either, for they also have that whiff of suspended self-respect and honor in pursuit of beating the con, the crooked game, for a gain which smells of too much greed and suspension of fairness. Everyone likes to win, but the feel of a self-compromising win feels awfully slimy to me, unbearably so. This kind of con is a real life selling of one's soul to a flesh and blood devil. If reporting a con makes you look bad because it is obvious you were trying to be dishonest and cheat someone yourself, no matter if it is legal or its appearance of safety, then you have bit a piece of the apple from Eden and you have no right to any supposed moral superiority.
There is no uncompromised character in this novel, but one. He is a construction worker that the others dislike working with because he values quality and esthetics over tawdry, of-the-moment style and flashy distractions. A number of characters literally and figuratively lose themselves because of siren calls to Desire of various false 'winning' situations, which actually come about from existing faults within each fallen antagonist. While I admire the expertise of the author's subtle outing of each character's flaw that shows the self-inflicted inner rot and the less than admirable, but ordinary, business of town life, it was obvious to me how the story would end. (A name like 'Burns' is a clear clue, as perhaps 'Mark-us'). All of these characters were so obviously, to me, corrupt behind their small world businesses that whatever usually pulls me into stories was missing. No one possessed any honor or worthy goals, except for the one 'carpenter' character, and he was not someone I liked much because he was so unbending.
As representing real life, the book is a five star winner, but as a novel to spend time reading, it's like eating stale cake while reading the Old Testament.
March 28, 2012
A book about 1980s real estate boondoggles. It could have been interesting. It wasn't.
Jane Smiley's writing is very good (she is a Pulitzer prize winner), and even though I was bored listening to this audiobook, waiting for something interesting to happen (nothing really does, until the very end, and what does happen is inevitable), I noted the difference between a real Writer, a literary Writer, a Writer who has mastered her craft, and one who's passably good, who can tell a tale, but has neither complete mastery of prose nor of characterization and plotting. Jane Smiley does; all of her characters are completely, totally real, acting like completely real, believable, complicated people in a story that is completely real and believable.
The problem with believable real-life stories and real-life people is that they're boring. Between Good Faith and some cheesy zombie apocalypse written by a hack, I'm afraid that while Good Faith might earn you more literary karma points for reading it, the zombie apocalypse is definitely more fun to read.
Part of the problem is the protagonist: Joe Stratford is the very definition of an average Joe. He's a realtor who sells nice houses to nice people and he's a nice guy. Okay, he's also having an affair with a married woman, but nobody's perfect. He gets caught up in the real estate fever of the early 80s, sweet-talked into a partnership by a former IRS agent who believes rules were meant to be creatively reinterpreted. So a bunch of people get greedy and stupid and you can see the disaster coming a mile away, but there's hardly any drama because Joe is just such a swell, ordinary fellow, he hardly gets worked up about anything. We get a lot of internal monologues and a fair number of sex scenes and a ton of details about real estate and S&Ls.
For Smiley's skill as a writer, I am giving this book 3 stars, though really there have been 2-star books that I enjoyed no less. It might have just been that this particular story did not interest me. I will probably try one of her other novels, someday, but I'll be more choosy about the one I try.
Jane Smiley's writing is very good (she is a Pulitzer prize winner), and even though I was bored listening to this audiobook, waiting for something interesting to happen (nothing really does, until the very end, and what does happen is inevitable), I noted the difference between a real Writer, a literary Writer, a Writer who has mastered her craft, and one who's passably good, who can tell a tale, but has neither complete mastery of prose nor of characterization and plotting. Jane Smiley does; all of her characters are completely, totally real, acting like completely real, believable, complicated people in a story that is completely real and believable.
The problem with believable real-life stories and real-life people is that they're boring. Between Good Faith and some cheesy zombie apocalypse written by a hack, I'm afraid that while Good Faith might earn you more literary karma points for reading it, the zombie apocalypse is definitely more fun to read.
Part of the problem is the protagonist: Joe Stratford is the very definition of an average Joe. He's a realtor who sells nice houses to nice people and he's a nice guy. Okay, he's also having an affair with a married woman, but nobody's perfect. He gets caught up in the real estate fever of the early 80s, sweet-talked into a partnership by a former IRS agent who believes rules were meant to be creatively reinterpreted. So a bunch of people get greedy and stupid and you can see the disaster coming a mile away, but there's hardly any drama because Joe is just such a swell, ordinary fellow, he hardly gets worked up about anything. We get a lot of internal monologues and a fair number of sex scenes and a ton of details about real estate and S&Ls.
For Smiley's skill as a writer, I am giving this book 3 stars, though really there have been 2-star books that I enjoyed no less. It might have just been that this particular story did not interest me. I will probably try one of her other novels, someday, but I'll be more choosy about the one I try.
March 2, 2019
The problem with American Literary fiction is it makes me feel stupid for not really getting what the point was. Well, not just the American stuff, but it’s worse because I don’t get the humour either. This was described on the back as “poignant, insightful and outrageous, it is Jane Smiley at her funniest and most slyly astute.” Unfortunately I didn’t find any of that. It was brought to our book club by our newest, most erudite member, who must’ve liked it. None of the others managed it, but I was determined to give it a go, although do somewhat regret not giving up after 100 pages when the only thing that had happened was people looking at, and talking about, houses. In the end, I didn’t hate it, but I was bored for most of it.
Joe Stratford is a moderately successful real estate agent in a small but well to do town outside of New York. Forty, and recently divorced with no children, he’s happy with his lot in life, but when a smooth talking former taxman, Marcus, moves in and proposes ambitious plans to develop property on an expensive local farm with Joe’s mentor, Gordon, he is sucked in by his new friend’s magnetism and they are soon well over their heads, but it’s the early eighties, there’s money everywhere, and Greed is Good, isn’t it?
I suppose this was well written but nothing about the prose really stood out. Joe the narrator is an amiable character who does the right thing, most of the time, and gets on with everyone. There’s a subplot about Joe’s affair with Gordon’s married daughter, which mostly seemed an excuse to bring in some smutty scenes, and to show how he really can’t make up his mind about anything. I liked some of the side characters, like the two Davids, renovators and gossips with their dog-children, and Gottfried the grumpy master-builder, but otherwise this just rather dull, with a fairly predictable outcome. Ah well, back to a nice comfortable thriller I go.
Joe Stratford is a moderately successful real estate agent in a small but well to do town outside of New York. Forty, and recently divorced with no children, he’s happy with his lot in life, but when a smooth talking former taxman, Marcus, moves in and proposes ambitious plans to develop property on an expensive local farm with Joe’s mentor, Gordon, he is sucked in by his new friend’s magnetism and they are soon well over their heads, but it’s the early eighties, there’s money everywhere, and Greed is Good, isn’t it?
I suppose this was well written but nothing about the prose really stood out. Joe the narrator is an amiable character who does the right thing, most of the time, and gets on with everyone. There’s a subplot about Joe’s affair with Gordon’s married daughter, which mostly seemed an excuse to bring in some smutty scenes, and to show how he really can’t make up his mind about anything. I liked some of the side characters, like the two Davids, renovators and gossips with their dog-children, and Gottfried the grumpy master-builder, but otherwise this just rather dull, with a fairly predictable outcome. Ah well, back to a nice comfortable thriller I go.
February 11, 2008
I have read (I think it was an Amazon review) that this book moves too slow for some readers. For me, the story builds upon the observations and experiences of the main character with the perfect clarity of a well-measured pace. Upon reflection, the plot bears slight resemblance to The Great Gadspy and Goodbye Columbus, but I liked it better than either. Smiley has more than one story to tell so if the 80s savings and loan scandal sounds dull, try one of her other books (Moo or The All-true Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton, for example). She’s a great author.
June 8, 2015
I'm in the minority--I loved this book and was not at all bored because the author looks at something very common and specifically American. In fact, all the characters were very easy for me to visualize and resembled people I know in real life.
I really enjoyed this book and admired the author's skill in telling the story from the POV of a naive, good-natured everyman who ought to know better. To me the story is very timely, focusing as it does on how good and sensible people get caught up in schemes to make money and the search for a more significant, interesting life. As the main character goes about his life, he sees details but misses their significance and the pattern behind them. He thinks he's more perceptive and sure of himself than he actually is. There are a lot of small character details that really showed how this long con works and WHY we are so gullible.
Several readers have said this book is "so 80's." But it could easily be set in 2007 (just before the real estate crash) or even now (at least where I live in the Bay Area). This is a story we keep re-enacting over and over (think "Wolf of Wall Street" and Bernie Madoff). The American Dream and American Greed = a classic and timeless tale.
I really enjoyed this book and admired the author's skill in telling the story from the POV of a naive, good-natured everyman who ought to know better. To me the story is very timely, focusing as it does on how good and sensible people get caught up in schemes to make money and the search for a more significant, interesting life. As the main character goes about his life, he sees details but misses their significance and the pattern behind them. He thinks he's more perceptive and sure of himself than he actually is. There are a lot of small character details that really showed how this long con works and WHY we are so gullible.
Several readers have said this book is "so 80's." But it could easily be set in 2007 (just before the real estate crash) or even now (at least where I live in the Bay Area). This is a story we keep re-enacting over and over (think "Wolf of Wall Street" and Bernie Madoff). The American Dream and American Greed = a classic and timeless tale.
March 7, 2011
Jane Smiley could probably write about anything and it would be worth reading. The things she writes about aren't new or exciting but she has a way of writing that makes me want to keep reading her books.
The blurb sounded terribly boring but she somehow made descriptions of housing developments and buying/selling real estate interesting. The first half of the book was great but it started to drag in the middle for me. It's clear that something bad will happen but the buildup takes forever. The characters Smiley created are unique and well developed so it's strange that the narrator seems to have NO personality. Towards the end we learn that he is a neat freak but for most of the book, he's just a passive observer.
There were some things that didn't add to the story and I didn't know why they were included. What was the point of all the descriptive sex scenes? There were quite a few. And whats the point of the part where two characters snorted cocaine? Am I missing something?
Good Faith was an ok read but not something I would read again and not a book I'll be keeping.
The blurb sounded terribly boring but she somehow made descriptions of housing developments and buying/selling real estate interesting. The first half of the book was great but it started to drag in the middle for me. It's clear that something bad will happen but the buildup takes forever. The characters Smiley created are unique and well developed so it's strange that the narrator seems to have NO personality. Towards the end we learn that he is a neat freak but for most of the book, he's just a passive observer.
There were some things that didn't add to the story and I didn't know why they were included. What was the point of all the descriptive sex scenes? There were quite a few. And whats the point of the part where two characters snorted cocaine? Am I missing something?
Good Faith was an ok read but not something I would read again and not a book I'll be keeping.
January 3, 2015
This book was so surprisingly entertaining, I feel like Jane Smiley can make any topic sing. I like how the roots of gentrification and Mcmansions are explored in a funny, rather than dark, way. It makes the 80s feel very long ago indeed.
August 12, 2007
meh. One of those books you can put down and use to level your desk if your hardwood floors are warped from the tears shed.
July 24, 2025
Just a slew of information packed together like sardines! No room to breathe. I’m exhausted and angry!
February 20, 2008
I can´t believe I finished this book. If it weren´t for the severe lack of good novels in Chilean patagonia, I´m sure I would have given up about halfway through. Smiley´s novel paints a picture of the greedy ambition that swept through the US during the 1980s. It is realistic fiction, designed to portray a shift in American culture during the social and economic changes in the Reagan era. The protagonist is a small town realtor in upstate new york, raised by saintly god-fearing parents and leading an otherwise dull but satisfied life. Then, a suave, urbane former IRS agent (an unconvincing character throughout the story) ushers in the new era as he inspires greed in the town. The two cultures are embodied in the women Joe sees during the story: Felicity, a carefree married mother of two, and Susan, a sophisticated, single cocaine-snorting beauty fresh from living ten years in the south of spain. I won´t waste any more space on this one except to say its not worth the time. After a promising start, the story crawls to painfully dull pace in the middle and then crumbles into a weak conclusion, as if Smiley just gave up on finishing the story.
January 11, 2016
I loved Jane Smiley's "A Thousand Acres," a sort of lurid, contemporary retelling of the King Lear story from the perspective of the grown daughters on a farm family in Iowa. I've read several of her other books but did not enjoy them as much as "Good Faith," with it's look at buying and selling property in the late nineties. The main character, Joe Stratford is a likable local realtor who makes a couple of new friends who suggest there may be some short cuts to the American Dream. It's a really good read.
June 2, 2008
Perhaps falling in love while reading affected my opinion of this book, but I strongly identify the lead character with my now-husband. It has artists, scammers, smart people who find their own naivete, scenery, progress - it's almost like a more-readable contemporary Ayn Rand novel. Don't buy a house without reading this novel!
September 8, 2016
A story about 80s excess, money, greed, naivete and sociopathy. Not my favourite Smiley - I found it tedious, like a slo-mo accident that you can see happening a mile away, until the last 50 or so pages. Then it became faster, better, deeper - and the complexity of the characters and personalities revealed themselves in ways both original and convincing. 3.5 stars.
December 15, 2013
No one should turn to Mark Twain for financial advice. But the man who managed to lose at least two fortunes did famously and wisely recommend buying real estate: "God's not making any more of it."
Fortunately, the supply of novels about real estate is still strong. Richard Ford's "Independence Day" and Steven Millhauser's "Martin Dressler" both won Pulitzer Prizes, and Tom Wolfe's mansion, "A Man in Full," should have.
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, which is a relief after the string of white elephants she's put up for sale lately. First, it's a manageable size, with just a small collection of expertly drawn characters. Second, all of these characters are people - no cows and pigs ("Moo") or studs and mares ("Horse Heaven"). And finally, it's a novel constructed without any prefab components ("Adventures of Lidie Newton").
Of course, "Good Faith" displays all the remarkable attention to detail that's the hallmark of Smiley's work. Her subject this time is the 1980s real estate boom, along with the savings and loan debacle. Clearly, she's earned an agent's license and probably degrees in accounting and engineering along the way, but all that technical homework is subordinated to the needs of the story. She no longer sounds like a brilliant, tiresome student angling for an A++ by cramming in every last bit of impressive research.
Indeed, despite the flashy context - billions created and billions lost in the nation's most spectacular financial bubble - Smiley keeps "Good Faith" tightly focused on a single real estate agent in a small New England town. Joe Stratford, the narrator, is a careful, honest man, the kind of agent who makes a living by looking out for his clients' best interests, understanding their concerns, enduring their rants, and soothing their anxieties.
He was raised by righteous, hardworking parents, members of a small, rapidly shrinking Christian sect. But since high school, Joe has felt like a son to Gordon Baldwin, a classic wheeler-dealer, generous to a fault with friends and family, but always looking to take advantage of everyone he negotiates with.
Joe lives modestly and neatly, and radiates integrity with every handshake, while Gordon struts through all the trappings of wealth, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and tax court. Together they've developed a symbiotic relationship: Gordon keeps Joe supplied with new houses to sell, and Joe keeps Gordon honest.
All that changes with the arrival of Marcus Burns, an ex-IRS agent who swoops into town and mesmerizes everyone. He's a prophet of the inflationary economy, preaching a doctrine of leveraged financing that sounds like voodoo economics to Joe. But with a phone call to old colleagues, Marcus makes Gordon's tax problems disappear. And then he has such creative ideas about how to enhance Gordon's latest subdivision project. "I would have to say that that's when the '80s began," Joe recalls, "the first week in June 1982, when modest housing in our rust-belt state got decked out with Italian tile."
He retains his skepticism, but Marcus has a pouch full of pixie dust, and before long a new partnership arises from Gordon's money, Joe's good name, and Marcus's irrational exuberance. "It's like everything in the world all of a sudden turned into money," Marcus tells them breathlessly.
The excesses of this era were so ludicrous that it would have been natural for Smiley to slip into parody. She can do that well, and it's easy now to laugh at the Laffer curve, to be tickled by trickledown theory. 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.
Marcus is such a troubled, troubling character, a man who evaluates everything from his tie to his wife for its dealmaking potential. He's simultaneously perceptive and deluded, permanently fixed in the patter of a get-rich infomercial.
When Joe asks in a friendly way about his experience in real estate, Marcus doesn't miss a beat. "This is the eighties," he shoots back. "Experience doesn't count anymore. It's just a drag on you, because if you make decisions according to your experience, you will have no idea what is happening in this country."
Guided by Marcus's vision, reassured by his confidence that the old rules don't apply anymore, Joe and Gordon overextend themselves to buy an enormous estate from one of the region's wealthiest families to construct a lavish community in the middle of nowhere. By Marcus's logic - backed by an eager new S&L president - the partnership can borrow its way out of debt, becoming in the process too big to fail. (Remember when those ideas sounded so comforting?)
Though buoyed by visions of billions - "Billions, not millions," Marcus insists - Joe finds himself suffering from a kind of loneliness he can barely articulate. A steamy affair (explicitly detailed) with one of Gordon's married daughters excites him for a while, but he may have imbibed too much of Marcus's ethic to actually fall in love.
Ultimately, it's clear that the great tragedy of this period for Joe is the loss of emotional, not financial opportunity. Readers over 30 know his real estate project will fail, along with the nation's banking system, but the value of an average joe's character requires a risk/reward evaluation that only a fine novel can calculate. Smiley has invested her best talent in this work, and you can buy it in good faith.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0410/p1...
Fortunately, the supply of novels about real estate is still strong. Richard Ford's "Independence Day" and Steven Millhauser's "Martin Dressler" both won Pulitzer Prizes, and Tom Wolfe's mansion, "A Man in Full," should have.
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, which is a relief after the string of white elephants she's put up for sale lately. First, it's a manageable size, with just a small collection of expertly drawn characters. Second, all of these characters are people - no cows and pigs ("Moo") or studs and mares ("Horse Heaven"). And finally, it's a novel constructed without any prefab components ("Adventures of Lidie Newton").
Of course, "Good Faith" displays all the remarkable attention to detail that's the hallmark of Smiley's work. Her subject this time is the 1980s real estate boom, along with the savings and loan debacle. Clearly, she's earned an agent's license and probably degrees in accounting and engineering along the way, but all that technical homework is subordinated to the needs of the story. She no longer sounds like a brilliant, tiresome student angling for an A++ by cramming in every last bit of impressive research.
Indeed, despite the flashy context - billions created and billions lost in the nation's most spectacular financial bubble - Smiley keeps "Good Faith" tightly focused on a single real estate agent in a small New England town. Joe Stratford, the narrator, is a careful, honest man, the kind of agent who makes a living by looking out for his clients' best interests, understanding their concerns, enduring their rants, and soothing their anxieties.
He was raised by righteous, hardworking parents, members of a small, rapidly shrinking Christian sect. But since high school, Joe has felt like a son to Gordon Baldwin, a classic wheeler-dealer, generous to a fault with friends and family, but always looking to take advantage of everyone he negotiates with.
Joe lives modestly and neatly, and radiates integrity with every handshake, while Gordon struts through all the trappings of wealth, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and tax court. Together they've developed a symbiotic relationship: Gordon keeps Joe supplied with new houses to sell, and Joe keeps Gordon honest.
All that changes with the arrival of Marcus Burns, an ex-IRS agent who swoops into town and mesmerizes everyone. He's a prophet of the inflationary economy, preaching a doctrine of leveraged financing that sounds like voodoo economics to Joe. But with a phone call to old colleagues, Marcus makes Gordon's tax problems disappear. And then he has such creative ideas about how to enhance Gordon's latest subdivision project. "I would have to say that that's when the '80s began," Joe recalls, "the first week in June 1982, when modest housing in our rust-belt state got decked out with Italian tile."
He retains his skepticism, but Marcus has a pouch full of pixie dust, and before long a new partnership arises from Gordon's money, Joe's good name, and Marcus's irrational exuberance. "It's like everything in the world all of a sudden turned into money," Marcus tells them breathlessly.
The excesses of this era were so ludicrous that it would have been natural for Smiley to slip into parody. She can do that well, and it's easy now to laugh at the Laffer curve, to be tickled by trickledown theory. 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.
Marcus is such a troubled, troubling character, a man who evaluates everything from his tie to his wife for its dealmaking potential. He's simultaneously perceptive and deluded, permanently fixed in the patter of a get-rich infomercial.
When Joe asks in a friendly way about his experience in real estate, Marcus doesn't miss a beat. "This is the eighties," he shoots back. "Experience doesn't count anymore. It's just a drag on you, because if you make decisions according to your experience, you will have no idea what is happening in this country."
Guided by Marcus's vision, reassured by his confidence that the old rules don't apply anymore, Joe and Gordon overextend themselves to buy an enormous estate from one of the region's wealthiest families to construct a lavish community in the middle of nowhere. By Marcus's logic - backed by an eager new S&L president - the partnership can borrow its way out of debt, becoming in the process too big to fail. (Remember when those ideas sounded so comforting?)
Though buoyed by visions of billions - "Billions, not millions," Marcus insists - Joe finds himself suffering from a kind of loneliness he can barely articulate. A steamy affair (explicitly detailed) with one of Gordon's married daughters excites him for a while, but he may have imbibed too much of Marcus's ethic to actually fall in love.
Ultimately, it's clear that the great tragedy of this period for Joe is the loss of emotional, not financial opportunity. Readers over 30 know his real estate project will fail, along with the nation's banking system, but the value of an average joe's character requires a risk/reward evaluation that only a fine novel can calculate. Smiley has invested her best talent in this work, and you can buy it in good faith.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0410/p1...
July 23, 2019
I love Jane Smiley. A Thousand Acres and Moo are some of my favorite books. I'm glad I read Good Faith, but I didn't find it quite as compelling. I did like the ending and have been thinking about the book for the past twenty four hours.If you're interested in how the ambition to get rich quick distorts people's lives (or just interested in real estate), you'll find something to chew on in this book. If you want to see how the S&L of the 1980s were experienced by the people embroiled in them -- especially as a precursor to the Great Recession, you'll enjoy it. It's never a bad idea to read one of Smiley's books.
July 10, 2024
This is a book that I found in our house, so we already owned it, and I thought it might be interesting. It's a fiction novel. The writing is ok. I'm no writer but I know when a book flows well for me or when it is developing a plot or characters so it seems to need more attention. The characters and subject matter were a first for me. The story has an initial group of characters who are real estate oriented. A home seller, a developer, a builder, and their wives and or girlfriends. Quickly into the story enters an ex IRS employee who gets the original characters interested and fired up about doing a bigger project than any of them is used to. The object being making a bigger pot of money for all of them. There is some drama mixed in. The characters like or dislike one another and have some mild, mostly behind the back conflict. The story starts to go a bit faster around two thirds of the way through. A bit of mystery gets into it and it left me mildly worried about the character I liked the most. The end, when the mystery comes to light, is one of those that leaves the characters kind of scattered, the good guy picking up his pieces to continue his life, and the villain never being seen or heard from again by the other main characters. I have a hard time with that. I like to see some vengeance on a bad guy if I can. Or at least see what happens to him or her. Not in this story. But I read the whole thing, which isn't saying much since I don't give up on a book unless I just flat out lose it or it gets taken from me or something. I would recommend this book to a person who is in the real estate or development industry. They might find it more interesting and be able to appreciate the subtle moves that occur in the book. I don't think I could recommend it to anyone else.
April 18, 2022
This could have been a very wrenching novel, full of angst, and hanky-twisting regrets, but Smiley has kept the whole business of deregulated morality (uh… banking) in the 1980s very light, almost frothy. Consider what Tom Wolfe did with Bonfire of the Vanities, exposing the Wall Street Masters of the Universe to scorn and ridicule, but Smiley has worked territory farther from the center of the money storm, illustrating the changed mindset of Reagan’s presidency, with its laxer governmental controls that enabled/encouraged staid suburbanites to begin playing the market.
I lived the 1980s as a full-fledged adult, working variously as a teacher, waiter, college admissions counselor, essay reader, bookstore clerk, and doing a two-year stint in graduate school. I even got married in the 80s and had my child before the decade ended, but I was too close, too immersed to see just what was going on outside my own small, liberal-arts bred worldview. Not till the early 90s did I finally perceive what the previous decade had wrought, especially when time and again there was news of banks, S&Ls, brokers, and multinationals that had defaulted on loans, cheated investors, or robbed employees’ pension plans. So, in short, Smiley has done a great job of setting up a scenario that I could review from a parallax of memory and her more immediate evocation.
My previous experience with Smiley has been her much-acclaimed One Thousand Acres, Moo, and Greenlanders (which is one of my all-time favorites, a novel that draws heavily from Icelandic saga). She is a deft and versatile writer, able to switch tones, themes, and settings with consummate skill. In Good Faith, she has chosen to narrate in the first person, assuming the voice of a 40-year-old man, Joe Stratford, divorced but seemingly still happy go lucky, brimming with bonhomie and a generally positive perspective on the world and his fellow human beings. There is a discursive ease in the narrative, and the story unfolds linearly, with even his ruminative moments only shimmeringly represented. In fact, it’s only at the end of the novel that he begins to spiral too intently on what has befallen him, but then comes out of that tailspin with what he aptly calls a sudden grace.
Joe Stratford sells real estate in New Hampshire, and the novel begins with him recounting a pair of difficult buyers and a difficult builder that he works with. The difficulties these people impose on him are just something to talk about rather than to get upset about, and he’s generally happy, even when he considers for a moment every now and then that his eight-year marriage went up in a puff of smoke. Joe is well-liked in the community, and people trust him. While he’s got his own parents to visit and tend, he’s also been adopted into the Baldwin family, where its enterprising patriarch, Gordon, has made him his first son, even over his own two adult sons. Gordon buys up farms and other property just to scavenge for what’s immediately profitable, then resells at a later time, which entails getting Joe involved.
Smiley is very good at slowly, slowly introducing the novel’s catalyst character, Marcus Burns, a charismatic smooth talker and former IRS man who’s looking for his next get-rich scheme. When the local Rockefeller-calibre family decides to relocate to Florida and sell their estate, Joe undertakes the project with Gordon, and very quickly Marcus Burns is talking them into turning the large mansion into a clubhouse at the edge of a golf-course community with high-end houses that will reflect aspects of the several styles subtly embedded in the mansion. Over the course of the next year and a half, there are all sorts of activities related to permitting, hiring, building, researching, and investing to get this billion-dollar project off the ground.
Joe is obliged to quit his real estate work and take a position in the new Salt Key Corporation, and he joins Marcus, Marcus’ sister Jane, Gordon, and a gas-station owner who wants to be mentored by Marcus. There’s much to-and-fro-ing throughout, and Joe is often with Marcus, often laughing and enjoying the camaraderie, finally deciding that Marcus is his best friend. Joe also goes through a six-month in-the-shadows affair with Felicity (nee Baldwin) Ornquist, then has a more open three-month fling with Susan Webster, a fair-weather lover who dumps him when Marcus, Jane, and Felicity all abscond with the entirety of the Salt Key funds.
While the reader is more aware that Marcus is too good to be true, Joe does have his inklings that something might be afoot, but he remains stolidly optimistic and trusting, right up to the end. When Marcus disappears, the local S&L quickly collapses, and its manager, a young wheeler-dealer whom Marcus had groomed, becomes the fall guy. Meanwhile, everyone else is left broke, obliged to pick up the pieces, which without much rancor, they do. Joe’s chief grumble is that Marcus had seemingly waited only till Joe turned over his life savings ($60k) to him before taking flight. The grace he speaks of that breaks his fall is a chance encounter with Felicity, who was also a victim of Marcus’ seductive patter, and they pursue one another down a ski slope.
What’s interesting in this pleasant, almost painless lesson in greed and financial chicanery is that there’d been no real greed or envy in any of the principals other than Marcus (and the S&L manager). Everyone had been content, and even Marcus’ tales of a new world order, where money was being thrown around, were less incentive than the scope of the project they were undertaking, which challenge fully engaged them. The sad truth is that money men only move money, and it’s generally not their own...
Perhaps the funniest single thing in the novel is Smiley’s post-novel acknowledgments, where she writes of the fiduciary advice she was given for the novel: “Several lawyers advised me on this project, but they preferred not to be mentioned by name. I thank them anyway.”
I lived the 1980s as a full-fledged adult, working variously as a teacher, waiter, college admissions counselor, essay reader, bookstore clerk, and doing a two-year stint in graduate school. I even got married in the 80s and had my child before the decade ended, but I was too close, too immersed to see just what was going on outside my own small, liberal-arts bred worldview. Not till the early 90s did I finally perceive what the previous decade had wrought, especially when time and again there was news of banks, S&Ls, brokers, and multinationals that had defaulted on loans, cheated investors, or robbed employees’ pension plans. So, in short, Smiley has done a great job of setting up a scenario that I could review from a parallax of memory and her more immediate evocation.
My previous experience with Smiley has been her much-acclaimed One Thousand Acres, Moo, and Greenlanders (which is one of my all-time favorites, a novel that draws heavily from Icelandic saga). She is a deft and versatile writer, able to switch tones, themes, and settings with consummate skill. In Good Faith, she has chosen to narrate in the first person, assuming the voice of a 40-year-old man, Joe Stratford, divorced but seemingly still happy go lucky, brimming with bonhomie and a generally positive perspective on the world and his fellow human beings. There is a discursive ease in the narrative, and the story unfolds linearly, with even his ruminative moments only shimmeringly represented. In fact, it’s only at the end of the novel that he begins to spiral too intently on what has befallen him, but then comes out of that tailspin with what he aptly calls a sudden grace.
Joe Stratford sells real estate in New Hampshire, and the novel begins with him recounting a pair of difficult buyers and a difficult builder that he works with. The difficulties these people impose on him are just something to talk about rather than to get upset about, and he’s generally happy, even when he considers for a moment every now and then that his eight-year marriage went up in a puff of smoke. Joe is well-liked in the community, and people trust him. While he’s got his own parents to visit and tend, he’s also been adopted into the Baldwin family, where its enterprising patriarch, Gordon, has made him his first son, even over his own two adult sons. Gordon buys up farms and other property just to scavenge for what’s immediately profitable, then resells at a later time, which entails getting Joe involved.
Smiley is very good at slowly, slowly introducing the novel’s catalyst character, Marcus Burns, a charismatic smooth talker and former IRS man who’s looking for his next get-rich scheme. When the local Rockefeller-calibre family decides to relocate to Florida and sell their estate, Joe undertakes the project with Gordon, and very quickly Marcus Burns is talking them into turning the large mansion into a clubhouse at the edge of a golf-course community with high-end houses that will reflect aspects of the several styles subtly embedded in the mansion. Over the course of the next year and a half, there are all sorts of activities related to permitting, hiring, building, researching, and investing to get this billion-dollar project off the ground.
Joe is obliged to quit his real estate work and take a position in the new Salt Key Corporation, and he joins Marcus, Marcus’ sister Jane, Gordon, and a gas-station owner who wants to be mentored by Marcus. There’s much to-and-fro-ing throughout, and Joe is often with Marcus, often laughing and enjoying the camaraderie, finally deciding that Marcus is his best friend. Joe also goes through a six-month in-the-shadows affair with Felicity (nee Baldwin) Ornquist, then has a more open three-month fling with Susan Webster, a fair-weather lover who dumps him when Marcus, Jane, and Felicity all abscond with the entirety of the Salt Key funds.
While the reader is more aware that Marcus is too good to be true, Joe does have his inklings that something might be afoot, but he remains stolidly optimistic and trusting, right up to the end. When Marcus disappears, the local S&L quickly collapses, and its manager, a young wheeler-dealer whom Marcus had groomed, becomes the fall guy. Meanwhile, everyone else is left broke, obliged to pick up the pieces, which without much rancor, they do. Joe’s chief grumble is that Marcus had seemingly waited only till Joe turned over his life savings ($60k) to him before taking flight. The grace he speaks of that breaks his fall is a chance encounter with Felicity, who was also a victim of Marcus’ seductive patter, and they pursue one another down a ski slope.
What’s interesting in this pleasant, almost painless lesson in greed and financial chicanery is that there’d been no real greed or envy in any of the principals other than Marcus (and the S&L manager). Everyone had been content, and even Marcus’ tales of a new world order, where money was being thrown around, were less incentive than the scope of the project they were undertaking, which challenge fully engaged them. The sad truth is that money men only move money, and it’s generally not their own...
Perhaps the funniest single thing in the novel is Smiley’s post-novel acknowledgments, where she writes of the fiduciary advice she was given for the novel: “Several lawyers advised me on this project, but they preferred not to be mentioned by name. I thank them anyway.”
June 7, 2022
honestly it kinda slayed especially when it paralleled nick and gatsby! joe is just like me for real, like when he experienced gay pining for the first time, couldn’t say no to anyone, and spent half the book trauma dumping about religion! if you take out the terribly written sex scenes i unironically liked it!
July 30, 2022
I’m not sure why I kept reading this book after the first 50 pages. The outcome was predictable and concluded as I suspected. I guess my enjoyment came from berating the characters for their obvious stupidity for the next 350 pages. You do what you can but some people just won’t listen.
June 2, 2024
A charismatic stranger comes to a satellite town near an urban area where our affable hero, a real estate agent connected to a family that develops properties among other things, plies his trade. The stranger ingratiates himself with some, influences others, arouses suspicions even among those otherwise well-disposed. He seems to be everywhere, to know everyone.
Savior or con-man?
In the meantime, our hero, who mainly conducts himself with integrity, is not long on inspiration and is easily co-opted into others' plans for him. Will he find love after a lifetime of bad luck?
Good Faith was not my favorite of hers but, as always with Jane Smiley, I am engaged with her story and her characters and will read everything I can find that she has written.
Savior or con-man?
In the meantime, our hero, who mainly conducts himself with integrity, is not long on inspiration and is easily co-opted into others' plans for him. Will he find love after a lifetime of bad luck?
Good Faith was not my favorite of hers but, as always with Jane Smiley, I am engaged with her story and her characters and will read everything I can find that she has written.
October 8, 2022
Warning—here be spoilers. (More a discourse than a review.)
For readers like me, books like Jane Smiley’s can never be “too long” or “boring” (as some reviewers feel), just as life itself can’t be that way (unless you make it so). Every character, their every funny or pithy utterance, their every little story, every shining description, is another pearl that Smiley adds to her lovely string—and the stringing could go on forever, as far as I’m concerned. Every day when I pick up a Jane Smiley book, I first re-read what I read the day before, so as not to miss any nuance, any bit of humor or sorrow, any dropped clue.
Clues: Smiley shows us in the first couple of pages why Joe trusts Marcus despite the warning signs that keep blinking ever more furiously (something that seems to befuddle most readers—including me, until I went back to the beginning and figured out why). It’s at least partly because Joe naturally accepts being told what to do: his high school girlfriend “brings him along” by constantly telling him “what to wear and do and think and say”—and he’s perfectly fine with it. When she’s through with him, he had become tall, good-looking and muscular. “She was never wrong,” he explains, and “she created me.” Well, so does Marcus. (Until.)
And Joe, average Joe, is also not oblivious to the allure of great riches—few people are, and in the 1980s? It was part of the zeitgeist, maybe. Forget the warning signs, the world is all new and different!
Is Marcus the devil? Twain’s Mysterious Stranger, Bulgakov’s well-dressed and mysterious foreigner, coming upon the unsuspecting locals and making predictions that soon come true, having second sight? Tempting people—or being tempted by them (as George Sloan wonders at the end)?
Loose ends that didn’t get tied up (well, they don’t in life, usually): I started to wonder whether Marcus already had a grand plan when he swooped into town. Because why did Thorpe tell Gordon he was the only one he would sell the farm to, what was the deal with the old guy’s kids, and in what way did Thorpe’s life not turn out like he thought, as he started to confide in Joe—but then didn’t? Did Marcus—scheming the whole thing out beforehand, wanting to get in on all the adventure he saw in those IRS returns—perhaps discover Salt Key Farm, hang out in the Viceroy looking for the right locals to help him get it, decide it was Joe and Gordon, via Bobby? Did Marcus have some kind of leverage to get Thorpe to sell Gordon the farm, and then weasel his way in with no capital of his own except a very persuasive manner? Maybe it wasn’t like that, but we just don’t know everything about Marcus, and the Thorpe mysteries remain unexplained.
Another thing we don’t know is whether it’s Marcus or Jane who is in fact the “pathological liar,” the one who initiated and saw through the Big Steal. And how and when did Marcus get together with Felicity? (I didn’t see THAT one coming!) But all these are things that Joe doesn’t know—or chooses not to tell us about—and therefore we can’t know either.
One of the two big unanswered questions for Joe is WHY Marcus stole his money (and, Joe doesn’t say—perhaps because it’s too painful and personal—also stole the woman he loved—because if Joe could tell from the way Marcus and Mary King simply walked across the parking lot that they were having an affair, then surely Marcus, and probably everyone else except Hank, could tell what was going on between Joe and Felicity). The other big question for Joe is WHEN Marcus decided to do it. But mostly we want to know WHY. I bet it’s because Marcus was jealous. Joe had so many things Marcus didn’t: nice parents (though strict), a lively and loving adopted family, respect in the community, kindness (per Felicity), honesty, professional competence and confidence. If Marcus couldn’t get those things from Joe, at least he could get his money and his lover (and HER money), neither of which Marcus needed or particularly wanted. Maybe it was revenge for Joe’s having a better life than he did, like (Marcus assumed) many of those taxpayers had.
Why did Felicity go? I bet she wouldn’t have if Joe had been able to “claim what might be his,” as Felicity explained his problem near the end. But he had been too cautious to claim Felicity, and now it was apparently too late.
Caution! Joe takes pains to tell us, over and over, how careful he always was, all his life. Felicity and Marcus offered him the chance to get out of that habit, and he did. But he went too far. Near the last, he did hesitate, he thought about it, he wasn’t sure about handing over his money. But his instinctive caution was overcome by the almighty dollar signs. And perhaps it was Felicity’s pointing out that he should “claim what might be his” that turned the tide and overcame his indecisiveness about handing over all his savings.
Luck is another theme in this book. Luck runs alongside Gordon like a river, but his son Bobby is always having accidents. Does it mean something if an old guy dies on Friday the thirteenth? If Joe can’t find a long red hair off the head of a woman who was just in his office?
In the 1980s, being “local” was boring, plodding, old-timey. Marcus came to town and showed the locals, including the S&L guys, a whole new, “national” world, exciting and oh so profitable! And Joe gave in to the allure of the “non-local,” the “exotic”—including in his appointed new girlfriend, Susan. Turns out, the wholesome “local” and the fancy “national” didn’t mix well after all.
Joe, telling the whole story looking back, noted the early warning signs of Marcus’s dishonesty: the trick Marcus played on him about the fence; Marcus’s “fix” of Gordon’s tax problem; his claiming seven dependents when he only had two kids; his son’s happy surprise when he learns the new house is theirs and he doesn’t have to worry about “the owners coming back.” (What was Marcus really doing all around the country after quitting the IRS? Scoping out the local scenes for get-rich-quick partners, most likely.)
But notice that Joe merely records the warning signs, without commenting on them—he doesn’t say, “I was a fool not to pay attention to them,” and doesn’t admit he was a sucker until the very end. When a late night with the engineer comes between him and the woman he loves, and he loses her, why don’t we hear any anguish from him? He seems oddly detached from the events he recounts. But maybe that’s how he has to tell the story—to avoid reliving the pain, to avoid blaming himself too much when it all turned out so terribly badly?
Along the way, you will love the Davids! Their scenes are pure gold!! You gotta love volatile Gottfried (sitting beside Joe at a closing like a “dormant volcano”), with his genius carpenter Dale; and the tale of George Sloan and that crazy house he couldn’t let go of.
It was there, at that house high above the valley, where Joe was given—but didn’t take—the chance to move beyond the unanswerable questions when looking up at the “fountain of stars” in the night sky, the Milky Way cutting across it.
Don’t we all have questions that are killing us, that we want to find out from someone who wronged us—but we never can find out? That someone would probably lie anyway. I understand why Joe couldn’t let it go. It’s the not knowing that eats at you.
But bless Jane Smiley for giving us/Joe that sudden appearance of “grace” at the end. What a beautiful final image!
Don’t miss all the funny geographical names: NUT Hollow, CASHel Heights, Rollins Hills (not Rolling), SELway, SAF Investments, SWALLOW Properties, ROOKwood CROSSing, etc. Ha!
Well before I got to the end of the book, I began to wonder whether the reviewers listed in the front of the paperback edition who called it “broadly funny” and “uproarious” had read all the way to the end. Yes, “Good Faith” certainly has much (delicious) comedy part of the way through, but it turns into a tragedy. (Both of which Smiley can do brilliantly, it goes without saying.) I liked Joe so much, what a nice guy, everyone loved him; it was hard to watch him fall—and lose his friendship with the other best person in the book, Betty. I wanted to cry at the end.
One reviewer (Donald Westlake of WaPo) hit the nail on the head with respect to ALL Smiley’s books: “The wealth of fascinating people inside her head [is] a national treasure.” I don’t know how she does it! It’s as if dozens, hundreds, of real people’s hearts and minds—people of every kind, from many places, many times (and don’t forget horses!)—somehow flow into her head and back out into her books, beautifully and delectably arranged for us.
For readers like me, books like Jane Smiley’s can never be “too long” or “boring” (as some reviewers feel), just as life itself can’t be that way (unless you make it so). Every character, their every funny or pithy utterance, their every little story, every shining description, is another pearl that Smiley adds to her lovely string—and the stringing could go on forever, as far as I’m concerned. Every day when I pick up a Jane Smiley book, I first re-read what I read the day before, so as not to miss any nuance, any bit of humor or sorrow, any dropped clue.
Clues: Smiley shows us in the first couple of pages why Joe trusts Marcus despite the warning signs that keep blinking ever more furiously (something that seems to befuddle most readers—including me, until I went back to the beginning and figured out why). It’s at least partly because Joe naturally accepts being told what to do: his high school girlfriend “brings him along” by constantly telling him “what to wear and do and think and say”—and he’s perfectly fine with it. When she’s through with him, he had become tall, good-looking and muscular. “She was never wrong,” he explains, and “she created me.” Well, so does Marcus. (Until.)
And Joe, average Joe, is also not oblivious to the allure of great riches—few people are, and in the 1980s? It was part of the zeitgeist, maybe. Forget the warning signs, the world is all new and different!
Is Marcus the devil? Twain’s Mysterious Stranger, Bulgakov’s well-dressed and mysterious foreigner, coming upon the unsuspecting locals and making predictions that soon come true, having second sight? Tempting people—or being tempted by them (as George Sloan wonders at the end)?
Loose ends that didn’t get tied up (well, they don’t in life, usually): I started to wonder whether Marcus already had a grand plan when he swooped into town. Because why did Thorpe tell Gordon he was the only one he would sell the farm to, what was the deal with the old guy’s kids, and in what way did Thorpe’s life not turn out like he thought, as he started to confide in Joe—but then didn’t? Did Marcus—scheming the whole thing out beforehand, wanting to get in on all the adventure he saw in those IRS returns—perhaps discover Salt Key Farm, hang out in the Viceroy looking for the right locals to help him get it, decide it was Joe and Gordon, via Bobby? Did Marcus have some kind of leverage to get Thorpe to sell Gordon the farm, and then weasel his way in with no capital of his own except a very persuasive manner? Maybe it wasn’t like that, but we just don’t know everything about Marcus, and the Thorpe mysteries remain unexplained.
Another thing we don’t know is whether it’s Marcus or Jane who is in fact the “pathological liar,” the one who initiated and saw through the Big Steal. And how and when did Marcus get together with Felicity? (I didn’t see THAT one coming!) But all these are things that Joe doesn’t know—or chooses not to tell us about—and therefore we can’t know either.
One of the two big unanswered questions for Joe is WHY Marcus stole his money (and, Joe doesn’t say—perhaps because it’s too painful and personal—also stole the woman he loved—because if Joe could tell from the way Marcus and Mary King simply walked across the parking lot that they were having an affair, then surely Marcus, and probably everyone else except Hank, could tell what was going on between Joe and Felicity). The other big question for Joe is WHEN Marcus decided to do it. But mostly we want to know WHY. I bet it’s because Marcus was jealous. Joe had so many things Marcus didn’t: nice parents (though strict), a lively and loving adopted family, respect in the community, kindness (per Felicity), honesty, professional competence and confidence. If Marcus couldn’t get those things from Joe, at least he could get his money and his lover (and HER money), neither of which Marcus needed or particularly wanted. Maybe it was revenge for Joe’s having a better life than he did, like (Marcus assumed) many of those taxpayers had.
Why did Felicity go? I bet she wouldn’t have if Joe had been able to “claim what might be his,” as Felicity explained his problem near the end. But he had been too cautious to claim Felicity, and now it was apparently too late.
Caution! Joe takes pains to tell us, over and over, how careful he always was, all his life. Felicity and Marcus offered him the chance to get out of that habit, and he did. But he went too far. Near the last, he did hesitate, he thought about it, he wasn’t sure about handing over his money. But his instinctive caution was overcome by the almighty dollar signs. And perhaps it was Felicity’s pointing out that he should “claim what might be his” that turned the tide and overcame his indecisiveness about handing over all his savings.
Luck is another theme in this book. Luck runs alongside Gordon like a river, but his son Bobby is always having accidents. Does it mean something if an old guy dies on Friday the thirteenth? If Joe can’t find a long red hair off the head of a woman who was just in his office?
In the 1980s, being “local” was boring, plodding, old-timey. Marcus came to town and showed the locals, including the S&L guys, a whole new, “national” world, exciting and oh so profitable! And Joe gave in to the allure of the “non-local,” the “exotic”—including in his appointed new girlfriend, Susan. Turns out, the wholesome “local” and the fancy “national” didn’t mix well after all.
Joe, telling the whole story looking back, noted the early warning signs of Marcus’s dishonesty: the trick Marcus played on him about the fence; Marcus’s “fix” of Gordon’s tax problem; his claiming seven dependents when he only had two kids; his son’s happy surprise when he learns the new house is theirs and he doesn’t have to worry about “the owners coming back.” (What was Marcus really doing all around the country after quitting the IRS? Scoping out the local scenes for get-rich-quick partners, most likely.)
But notice that Joe merely records the warning signs, without commenting on them—he doesn’t say, “I was a fool not to pay attention to them,” and doesn’t admit he was a sucker until the very end. When a late night with the engineer comes between him and the woman he loves, and he loses her, why don’t we hear any anguish from him? He seems oddly detached from the events he recounts. But maybe that’s how he has to tell the story—to avoid reliving the pain, to avoid blaming himself too much when it all turned out so terribly badly?
Along the way, you will love the Davids! Their scenes are pure gold!! You gotta love volatile Gottfried (sitting beside Joe at a closing like a “dormant volcano”), with his genius carpenter Dale; and the tale of George Sloan and that crazy house he couldn’t let go of.
It was there, at that house high above the valley, where Joe was given—but didn’t take—the chance to move beyond the unanswerable questions when looking up at the “fountain of stars” in the night sky, the Milky Way cutting across it.
Don’t we all have questions that are killing us, that we want to find out from someone who wronged us—but we never can find out? That someone would probably lie anyway. I understand why Joe couldn’t let it go. It’s the not knowing that eats at you.
But bless Jane Smiley for giving us/Joe that sudden appearance of “grace” at the end. What a beautiful final image!
Don’t miss all the funny geographical names: NUT Hollow, CASHel Heights, Rollins Hills (not Rolling), SELway, SAF Investments, SWALLOW Properties, ROOKwood CROSSing, etc. Ha!
Well before I got to the end of the book, I began to wonder whether the reviewers listed in the front of the paperback edition who called it “broadly funny” and “uproarious” had read all the way to the end. Yes, “Good Faith” certainly has much (delicious) comedy part of the way through, but it turns into a tragedy. (Both of which Smiley can do brilliantly, it goes without saying.) I liked Joe so much, what a nice guy, everyone loved him; it was hard to watch him fall—and lose his friendship with the other best person in the book, Betty. I wanted to cry at the end.
One reviewer (Donald Westlake of WaPo) hit the nail on the head with respect to ALL Smiley’s books: “The wealth of fascinating people inside her head [is] a national treasure.” I don’t know how she does it! It’s as if dozens, hundreds, of real people’s hearts and minds—people of every kind, from many places, many times (and don’t forget horses!)—somehow flow into her head and back out into her books, beautifully and delectably arranged for us.
September 20, 2011
After reading Jane Smiley's abysmally bad "Ten Days in the Hills", I vowed never to waste any more time on Ms. Smiley's fiction. In a fit of masochism, I broke that vow to read "Good Faith", her 2003 novel centered on the real estate world, circa 1983 in the vicinity of Portsmouth (NH? The book never specifically says, but it's inferred to be north of Boston, MA), in the Reagan era. What was most surprising was that the book was pretty interesting, and occasionally flashed brilliance. Like many fellow reviews here, I would chime in that Ms. Smiley really needed a better editor; judicious cuts and revisions could've made this sizzle and spark instead of meandering weakly to the finish line.
Scoff if you must but "Good Faith"'s core subject is real estate. The title, though (one of the most apt I've encountered) will to the savvy reader imply there shall be questions of faith, of trust and reliance (not to mention the the obvious straightforward definition of a good-faith loan and pre-escrow security deposit) writ larger and extrapolated. Ms. Smiley weaves a lively yarn, with Joe Stafford at the center: a reasonably successful agent primarily focused on selling high-end custom-made houses, who is befriended/enchanted/manipulated by a mystery (um...for lack of a better term) Financial Svengali who convinces Joe to abandon his agency and go into partnership with him selling houses at a planned resort community in the middle of Podunk, and in the process, wheedled Joe into cleaning out his sizable savings stash to fund this endeavor. You pretty much know from the outset things aren't going to go well for Joe...you just don't know to what lows he's going to prostrate himself just to appease the mystery-man. It's a little far-fetched to imagine any self-respecting businessman falling for the Svengali's overly glib schtick, but Ms. Smiley does a real good job with imbuing her characters with sufficient guile/naïveté and infusing the story with seemingly well-researched industry argolt that she compels the reader to make leaps of faith (and logic) to sustain the reader's attention (and enjoyment)... UNTIL ....Ms. Smiley, after exhausting a skeezy go-nowhere sub-plot involving an affair with the sister of a former fiancee (about midway through the book), Ms. Smiley gets derailed after introducing the Savings and Loan investors, who end up falling for the Svengali's lies too. Turns out the Svengali has a conniving sister, too, so she's thrown in the mix. For the reader, it seems as if Ms. Smiley's train of thought got derailed and she's just throwing up plot points, hoping something will "stick". What started out a quite original story with real characters and convincing dialog devolved into something a little less than satisfying (read: Boring) and implausible. This is when a better editor (or even AN editor...maybe she was given carte-blanche to self-edit) could've easily reined her in and salvaged the story (and clean up several instances of incidental errata, from misspells/typos to subject/verb disagreements, to paragraphs that forget who the subject of it is and barrel onward oblivious they don't make an iota of sense...errors that are unforgivable from a clearly-gifted Pulitzer Prize winner like Ms. Smiley).
Scoff if you must but "Good Faith"'s core subject is real estate. The title, though (one of the most apt I've encountered) will to the savvy reader imply there shall be questions of faith, of trust and reliance (not to mention the the obvious straightforward definition of a good-faith loan and pre-escrow security deposit) writ larger and extrapolated. Ms. Smiley weaves a lively yarn, with Joe Stafford at the center: a reasonably successful agent primarily focused on selling high-end custom-made houses, who is befriended/enchanted/manipulated by a mystery (um...for lack of a better term) Financial Svengali who convinces Joe to abandon his agency and go into partnership with him selling houses at a planned resort community in the middle of Podunk, and in the process, wheedled Joe into cleaning out his sizable savings stash to fund this endeavor. You pretty much know from the outset things aren't going to go well for Joe...you just don't know to what lows he's going to prostrate himself just to appease the mystery-man. It's a little far-fetched to imagine any self-respecting businessman falling for the Svengali's overly glib schtick, but Ms. Smiley does a real good job with imbuing her characters with sufficient guile/naïveté and infusing the story with seemingly well-researched industry argolt that she compels the reader to make leaps of faith (and logic) to sustain the reader's attention (and enjoyment)... UNTIL ....Ms. Smiley, after exhausting a skeezy go-nowhere sub-plot involving an affair with the sister of a former fiancee (about midway through the book), Ms. Smiley gets derailed after introducing the Savings and Loan investors, who end up falling for the Svengali's lies too. Turns out the Svengali has a conniving sister, too, so she's thrown in the mix. For the reader, it seems as if Ms. Smiley's train of thought got derailed and she's just throwing up plot points, hoping something will "stick". What started out a quite original story with real characters and convincing dialog devolved into something a little less than satisfying (read: Boring) and implausible. This is when a better editor (or even AN editor...maybe she was given carte-blanche to self-edit) could've easily reined her in and salvaged the story (and clean up several instances of incidental errata, from misspells/typos to subject/verb disagreements, to paragraphs that forget who the subject of it is and barrel onward oblivious they don't make an iota of sense...errors that are unforgivable from a clearly-gifted Pulitzer Prize winner like Ms. Smiley).
April 16, 2016
SPOILER ALERT: There are spoilers in this review.
Presidential candidates invoke the name of Ronald Reagan often in this political season. Pols look back with reverence on Reagan and associate themselves with his formidable political skills. Jane Smiley's 2003 novel, "Good Faith," focuses on the dark side of the Reagan years.
Set in a rural rust-belt community somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania, "Good Faith" is the classic con man tale. Joe Stafford, the protagonist and lifelong resident of the town, is a popular, respected real estate broker. A divorced man in his 40s, Stafford sells houses built by his mentor, Gordon Baldwin, a wily contractor and businessman with a wide portfolio. Baldwin is a self-made man who espouses old school values.
As Stafford adjusts to single life in his 40s, his only source of stress is to figure out new ways to keep secret his affair with Baldwin's married daughter, Felicity (I love the names Smile gives to her characters) in this small town where everyone knows everyone else's business.
Financially, Stafford and Baldwin are doing just fine, but they know they are small-town cronies. So, when they have a chance to get filthy rich, they can't resist. The MacGuffin in this story is an offer Baldwin receives to buy the 580-acre Salt Key Farm for a sprawling multi-use development. That's when wild dreams of obscene wealth fill the heads of Stafford and Baldwin. Enter Marcus Burns, a former IRS agent who moves to town and befriends both Stafford and Baldwin. Burns has found a way to make Baldwin's $275,000 tax debt to the IRS go away and he convinces the two men to allow him to manage the Salt Key Farm development.
Burns tips his business partners off that things are about to change in the 1980s. "And believe you me, the way things are going in Washington, there is going to be more fun, more more more fun than anyone has ever had since God knows when, because the tax code is transforming before your very eyes, and everyone is perfectly happy to see it happen." Burns convinces Stafford he will make millions.
"Money these days is like water. It can't stop looking for places to go, Burns tells Stafford.
Burns is a charmer. He knows what button to push to ingratiate himself with the townspeople. He is an amiable Irishman who has survived a bad childhood and has worked tirelessly to make himself a success. If he sounds like Reagan it's no accident.
Of course, like many real estate schemes of the 1980s, this one doesn't end well. Burns swindles a huge loan out of a high flying Savings & Loan to finance the project, borrows Stafford's nest egg and skips. town. And he whisks away Felicity to boot. While this is clearly a morality tale, it is also a well-paced, richly detailed story wtih a strong ensemble cast. Despite its dark subject, it is told with Smiley's classic dry wit.
Beyond the political lesson, Smiley also leaves broader lessons about human nature, temptation and greed. As Stafford reflects on his experience he recalls, "Looking back, I would have to say that's when the Eighties began as far as I was concerned -- when modest housing in our rust-belt state got decked out with Italian marble."
Presidential candidates invoke the name of Ronald Reagan often in this political season. Pols look back with reverence on Reagan and associate themselves with his formidable political skills. Jane Smiley's 2003 novel, "Good Faith," focuses on the dark side of the Reagan years.
Set in a rural rust-belt community somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania, "Good Faith" is the classic con man tale. Joe Stafford, the protagonist and lifelong resident of the town, is a popular, respected real estate broker. A divorced man in his 40s, Stafford sells houses built by his mentor, Gordon Baldwin, a wily contractor and businessman with a wide portfolio. Baldwin is a self-made man who espouses old school values.
As Stafford adjusts to single life in his 40s, his only source of stress is to figure out new ways to keep secret his affair with Baldwin's married daughter, Felicity (I love the names Smile gives to her characters) in this small town where everyone knows everyone else's business.
Financially, Stafford and Baldwin are doing just fine, but they know they are small-town cronies. So, when they have a chance to get filthy rich, they can't resist. The MacGuffin in this story is an offer Baldwin receives to buy the 580-acre Salt Key Farm for a sprawling multi-use development. That's when wild dreams of obscene wealth fill the heads of Stafford and Baldwin. Enter Marcus Burns, a former IRS agent who moves to town and befriends both Stafford and Baldwin. Burns has found a way to make Baldwin's $275,000 tax debt to the IRS go away and he convinces the two men to allow him to manage the Salt Key Farm development.
Burns tips his business partners off that things are about to change in the 1980s. "And believe you me, the way things are going in Washington, there is going to be more fun, more more more fun than anyone has ever had since God knows when, because the tax code is transforming before your very eyes, and everyone is perfectly happy to see it happen." Burns convinces Stafford he will make millions.
"Money these days is like water. It can't stop looking for places to go, Burns tells Stafford.
Burns is a charmer. He knows what button to push to ingratiate himself with the townspeople. He is an amiable Irishman who has survived a bad childhood and has worked tirelessly to make himself a success. If he sounds like Reagan it's no accident.
Of course, like many real estate schemes of the 1980s, this one doesn't end well. Burns swindles a huge loan out of a high flying Savings & Loan to finance the project, borrows Stafford's nest egg and skips. town. And he whisks away Felicity to boot. While this is clearly a morality tale, it is also a well-paced, richly detailed story wtih a strong ensemble cast. Despite its dark subject, it is told with Smiley's classic dry wit.
Beyond the political lesson, Smiley also leaves broader lessons about human nature, temptation and greed. As Stafford reflects on his experience he recalls, "Looking back, I would have to say that's when the Eighties began as far as I was concerned -- when modest housing in our rust-belt state got decked out with Italian marble."
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 2, 2016
This is an excellent look at an ordinary joe caught up in others’ schemes, in this case a big real estate project in 1980s New Jersey, when and where real estate was booming (I was living there then, in the fasting growing county in the U.S.). The novel’s brilliance and problems both come from having chosen the ordinary joe to tell the story.
The brilliance involves the novel being one of things happening to (rather than by) the protagonist, but with his cooperation (even when he is doubtful). The reading experience is one of watching a slow train wreck from the point of view of someone who is partially knowledgeable but passive.
The two problems are (1) that the ordinary joe is rather dull and the novel is long and (2) some of his perceptions, the better prose, and the fact that he’s telling the story the way he does, chronologically with great restraint, are all unbelievable. Had the novel been told in the third person but strictly from his point of view, it could have been both more believable and less dull.
But it’s still a fresh reading experience and, despite its problems, a minor masterpiece.
The brilliance involves the novel being one of things happening to (rather than by) the protagonist, but with his cooperation (even when he is doubtful). The reading experience is one of watching a slow train wreck from the point of view of someone who is partially knowledgeable but passive.
The two problems are (1) that the ordinary joe is rather dull and the novel is long and (2) some of his perceptions, the better prose, and the fact that he’s telling the story the way he does, chronologically with great restraint, are all unbelievable. Had the novel been told in the third person but strictly from his point of view, it could have been both more believable and less dull.
But it’s still a fresh reading experience and, despite its problems, a minor masterpiece.
February 13, 2021
2021 Response: Yes, this story revolves around a 40-year-old Joe, a real estate agent, as he becomes swept up in a development deal in the freewheeling savings and loan bubble in 1982-83. So it is a novel where real estate features heavily into the story, but it's more about how the lure of easy money, tax dodges, adulterous affairs, and self-regard* create intoxicating thrills and certain moral failure. The novel's tone is pure masculinity, or, that is, masculinity as it was reinterpreted by Jane Smiley as she wrote this novel in the early 2000s. Interestingly, the women in Joe's realm can be studied only through Joe's perspective, so they emerge solely as they benefit or bother Joe. If there were one word to sum up the insights and recriminations Joe is able to recognize, it would be "folly."
*Maddeningly, it has a short passage about Donald Trump and for the love of all that is good, why do I have to keep running into him everywhere?
My memory of my impression when I first read this book in 2003: I like novels about real estate.
*Maddeningly, it has a short passage about Donald Trump and for the love of all that is good, why do I have to keep running into him everywhere?
My memory of my impression when I first read this book in 2003: I like novels about real estate.
September 24, 2010
If Rex Pickett had written Sideways about real estate instead of wine, you would have Jane Smiley’s Good Faith.
If you like a slow narrative about a field that you’re not passionate about, read Good Faith. It’s a 400+ page novel that is too involved in the uninteresting.
It’s 1982, and the narrator is a man named Joey Stratford. Stratford is an honest and ethical real estate man who makes an average living. Life changes for the lonely, divorced, restless real estate man when an ex-IRS man turned investment adviser named Marcus Burns rolls into town (a la You’ve Got Trouble Right Here In River City).
Jane Smily can write. I occasionally found myself interested in the boring topic – but this entire story was predictable. I thought at midpoint that I had to finish because surely Smily would twist up and give me an ending that would be a surprise. Sadly, it’s exactly what was predicted in chapter 3.
In ten words: If you like real estate, this book might be enjoyable.
If you like a slow narrative about a field that you’re not passionate about, read Good Faith. It’s a 400+ page novel that is too involved in the uninteresting.
It’s 1982, and the narrator is a man named Joey Stratford. Stratford is an honest and ethical real estate man who makes an average living. Life changes for the lonely, divorced, restless real estate man when an ex-IRS man turned investment adviser named Marcus Burns rolls into town (a la You’ve Got Trouble Right Here In River City).
Jane Smily can write. I occasionally found myself interested in the boring topic – but this entire story was predictable. I thought at midpoint that I had to finish because surely Smily would twist up and give me an ending that would be a surprise. Sadly, it’s exactly what was predicted in chapter 3.
In ten words: If you like real estate, this book might be enjoyable.
October 12, 2015
I don't think I got this book; the whole time I was reading, and now as well, I felt like something big was going over my head, like I was missing some obvious piece. I agree with some reviewers, did move slowly, but the characters were precisely drawn real people and real life moves slowly at times. It reminds me of The Great Gatsby and An American Tragedy—the American Dream in action. Jane Smiley is a very interesting writer, though, and I did like the way she used her words. Hated the sex scenes. Descriptive but unemotional—maybe a little too removed for me?
July 26, 2016
This Jane Smiley novel took me back to the early 1980s and into the lives of inhabitants of a small American town. Joe Stratford is a likeable realtor who is closely connected to the Baldwin family. This connection nourishes him both personally and professionally. Rich with real estate adventures, Joe's life sails along until the arrival of former IRS agent Marcus Burns. The dynamic changes and so do the stakes. I could feel how things were going to turn out, but Joe's is starstruck by his first male friend.
I felt like I knew these people and felt Joey's losses deeply.
I felt like I knew these people and felt Joey's losses deeply.
July 25, 2008
Eh... it was good, bot great; a good summer book. This is my foray into the Jane Smiley catalog, so I don't know how the more lauded novels stand up against this one. I found her female characters to be empty and not particularly deep; the main male character was the most complex female character in the whole novel. Anyway, it's a fun read, but by no means necessary.
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