Opening a Jane Smiley novel is like slipping into a warm bath. Here are people we know, places where we grew up. But the comforting, unassuming tone of her work allows Smiley incredible latitude as a writer, and her books are full of surprises. Good Faith, a novel about greed and self-delusion set in the economic boom of the early 1980s, is no exception. Joe Stratford is an amiable, divorced real estate agent in an unspoiled small town called Rollins Hills. He takes it in stride when a married female friend pursues a love affair with him; he is more suspicious when a high-rolling newcomer named Marcus Burns begins to influence the business affairs of the men closest to Joe. Nevertheless, the promise of easy riches draws Joe into one of Burns's real estate development schemes, and then, ominously, into gold trading. The steps by which a nice guy can be lured into betraying his principles are delineated so sharply in Good Faith that you wonder how Joe cannot see them. Although he never quite manages to understand what has happened to him, he's granted a moment of grace at the close of the novel, a second chance that has nothing to do with money, ambition, or the tarnished American Dream. Since we live with the legacy of the self-serving 1980s, Smiley's novel seems as timely as if it were set in the present. Penetrating, readable fiction by one of our best writers and social critics. --Regina Marler

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

From Library Journal
In this indictment of the gilded 1980s, Joe reluctantly joins pal Marcus in a get-rich-quick real estate scheme that just seems too easy. With an impressive 12-city author tour. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Smiley has never been more seductive than in this acutely entertaining novel of big-time greed coming to a small East Coast town in the high-rolling 1980s. In her last novel, Horse Heaven (2000), Smiley, brilliant and versatile, constructed a complex collage of characters and story lines. Here she concentrates on the significantly limited perspective of Joe Stratford, a handsome and seemingly imperturbable realtor. The only child of pious parents, Joe found a more simpatico family in the expansive Baldwins. He enjoys working for the wheeler-dealer patriarch, Gordon, and is in love with his free-spirited yet married daughter, Felicity. Gordon and Joe were just starting to plan some modest housing developments for the farmland they recently acquired when a nattily attired, voluble, and ambitious former IRS agent shows up looking for a fancy house and a new line of work. Joe is initially skeptical of the aggressive newcomer's insistent prediction of a looming real estate boom and extravagant vision of luxury homes, golf courses, and boutiques blossoming all over the placid countryside. But Marcus is bewitchingly charming and convincing, and soon Joe is ensnared in the web of a wildly speculative and highly questionable venture. Smiley is fascinated by obsession, and all the jargon and arcane knowledge associated with risky pursuits, and she expertly reanimates the mad and venal, not to mention illegal and disastrous, financial finagling that drove the money-mad, coked-up eighties, providing a thrilling rear-view mirror look at that notoriously covetous time. But this expertly crafted and subtly suspenseful tale is also notable for its exuberant eroticism: Smiley's sex scenes, and there are many, are truly ravishing. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"It is hard to imagine how Smiley could have made Good Faith better. Like a sturdy, well-planned house, it makes room for everybody, and it ought to last a long, long time.?
?Margaria Fichtner, Miami Herald

?Stolen intimacies, greed, corruption: There?s much in Good Faith that strikes a chord today?Smiley?s new novel is at heart a meditation on community and the way money can warp the social contract.?
?John Freeman, Time Out New York

?Jane Smiley has produced an irresistible novel of bad manners, a meditation on love and money that Jane Austen might have enjoyed, if she could have handled the sex.?
?Richard Lacayo, Time

?This is a typical Jane Smiley novel, not, of course, in its subject matter, but in its power to beguile and enthrall.?
?Paul Gray, New York Times Book Review

?A cautionary prequel just right for our times. And great fun, to boot.?
?Jane Ciabattari, Los Angeles Times

?[Smiley] is one of our most Dickensian novelists, her imagination is prodigious, her observations exact, and the wealth of fascinating people inside her head a national treasure.?
?Donald E. Westlake, Washington Post Book World

?[A] lusty, testosterone-pumped tale, which both revisits Smiley?s obsession with infidelity and underlines her remarkable ability to humanize an industry.?
?Daniel Jones, Elle

?Smiley has invested her best talent in this work, and you can buy it in good faith.?
?Ron Charles, Christian Science Monitor

?She captures exactly the ?80s zest for moneymaking, the sense that anything, fortuitously touched, can be made to glisten? In doing so, she reveals herself as one of the most traditional of novelists, one not afraid of making a point, or of ending a story with a well-found moral.?
?Paul Evans, Book

?Pulitzer Prize winner Smiley once again opens a convincing fictional window on an American subculture; this time around it?s financial speculation in the early 1980s?Schemes play out in a tragicomedy featuring a Dickensian mix of quirky characters chasing their versions of the American dream. Smiley?s amusing plot is charged with energy, her sense of time and place is on target, and her research into the ways and means of real estate development is seamlessly integrated?This absorbing book will appeal to a wide variety of readers.?
?Starr E. Smith, Library Journal

?Smiley?s range as a writer is always surprising. Eschewing both the tragic dimension of A Thousand Acres and the satiric glee of Moo, her 12th book is a clever and entertaining cautionary tale about America?s greedy decade of the 1980s?What makes the story beguiling is Smiley?s appreciation of the varieties and frailties of human nature. Every character here is fresh and fully dimensional, and anybody who lived through the ?80s will recognize them?and maybe themselves. Forecast: Only readers seeking the emotional wallop of A Thousand Acres will be disappointed by this lively tale, written with literary finesse. Booksellers can bet on a bestseller.?
?Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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

?Smiley nails the Greed Decade with her trademark precision and philosophical bite. In 1982, narrator Joe Stratford is a divorced 40-year-old realtor in a part of New Jersey just beginning the transition from provincial backwater to upscale suburb?Marcus [Burns] is a con man, but Smiley expertly conveys his appeal to people quietly bored with their constricted lives?As Joe is drawn into [Marcus?s] scams, the author unsparingly but with considerable empathy depicts the complicity of a decent guy doing questionable things that give him an alluring sense of freedom and power?A novel that, like A Thousand Acres, acknowledges both the seductiveness of excess and the necessity of limits. Blunt and bold: the work of one of America?s best writers.?
?Kirkus (starred review)


From the Hardcover edition.

FROM OUR EDITORS

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

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Joe Stratford is someone you like at once. He makes an honest living helping nice people buy and sell nice houses. His not very amicable divorce is finally settled, and he's ready to begin again. It's 1982. He is pretty happy, pretty satisfied. But a different era has dawned; Joe's new friend, Marcus Burns from New York, seems to be suggesting that the old rules are ready to be repealed, that now is the time you can get rich quick. Really rich. And Marcus not only knows that everyone is going to get rich, he knows how. Because Marcus just quit a job with the IRS." "But is Joe ready for the kind of success Marcus promises he can deliver? And what's the real scoop on Salt Key Farm? Is this really the development opportunity of a lifetime?" "And then there's Felicity Ornquist, the lovely, feisty, winning (and married) daughter of Joe's mentor and business partner. She has finally owned up to her feelings for Joe: She's just been waiting for him to be available." The question Joe asks himself, over and over, is, Does he have the gumption? Does he have the smarts and the imagination and the staying power to pay attention - to Marcus and to Felicity - and reap the rewards?

SYNOPSIS

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“Smashing. . . . Fascinating. . . . Extremely subtle and nuanced. . . . [It has the] power to beguile and enthrall.” —The New York Times Book Review

The introduction, discussion questions, suggested reading list, and author biography that follow are designed to enhance your group’s reading of Jane Smiley’s Good Faith. In this new novel she brings her extraordinary gifts to the seductive, wishful, wistful world of real estate, in which the sport of choice is a mind game.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

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

The Los Angeles Times

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

The Washington Post

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

The New York Times Sunday Book Review

For all of her serial genre-surfing, though, Smiley has remained faithful to an ideal of sheer readability, to the Jamesian dictum that a novelist's principal task is to be ''interesting.'' Her artistry in doing so, in populating her fiction with interesting characters doing equally interesting things, is camouflaged by how easy she makes it all look. — Paul Gray

Daniel Jones