Synopsis
In Jane Smiley's 12th book, Joe Stratford, a newly divorced real estate salesman, wants to get rich. His friend Marcus Burns has some ideas for how to make it happen. It's 1982, and Joe is tempted--but his life is also complicated by the attentions of an alluring woman who, unfortunately, happens to be married to someone else. A New York Times Notable Book for 2003.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 2003-08-01 | | Narrated by: | Richard Poe | | Edition Description: | Unabridged |
Industry Reviews
"Smiley nails the Greed Decade with her trademark precision and philosophical bite....Blunt and bold: the work of one of America's best writers."
Kirkus Reviews (01/01/2003)
"Smiley has a famous affection for Dickens, and this is her first novel to be published since her short biography of Dickens appeared last year. Like Dickens, she has the rare ability to split the difference between emotional 'interiority' and social 'expertise.' So it's curious that GOOD FAITH itself attempts no such compromise: If Smiley's two preoccupations are waging an ongoing battle in her head, then social context has won the latest round in a rout. What results is a solid, smart, keen-eyed novel that nonetheless lacks some of the strengths readers associate most closely with Jane Smiley....Smiley's gifts have always been as much intellectual as emotional. At her best she has a Zenlike understanding of human motivation and its paradoxes....And she does not flinch when the dramatic situation she has written herself into calls for a socio-economic exegesis--even political exegesis--rather than empathy. This is the way a good journalist's intelligence works, or a good historian's, and it is the kind of intelligence that forms the backbone of Good Faith."
Slate - Christopher Caldwell (05/06/2003)
"GOOD FAITH is, in essence, an extremely subtle and nuanced polemic....[H]er real target now [is] the endless struggle within individual consciences between sharing and selfishness, between the common good and untrammeled acquisitiveness....Because it is pitched somewhere between the high tragedy of A THOUSAND ACRES and the low comedy of MOO, GOOD FAITH may strike some of Smiley's readers...as a middling performance. In truth, [it] builds momentum as it goes on and leads to a smashing finale and a wiser narrator. This is a typical Jane Smiley novel, not, of course, in its subject matter but in its power to beguile and enthrall."
New York Times Book Review - Paul Gray (04/13/2003)
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