Rating: 
Summary: Another great book by Smiley!
Review: I've enjoyed all of Smiley's books but this one reminded me of people I know. Joe, for instance, reminds me of an army major I once served with. The story, too, is one that you can easily see happening - we all know of cases in life where it sometimes seems like people have sort of stumbled onto a path that's heading toward something bad but (whether you're reading this book or watching something like this happen to friends), there's not much you can do but watch the train wreck start to happen and try to anticipate what the next steps of each of the characters will be. This is definitely worth reading - even my husband liked it, and he tends more toward action thrillers. (Joe's uncanny resemblance to our army officer colleague made it intriguing to him, too - I wonder if Ms Smiley knew him, too? The world is small...) Good book - read it!
One comment must be made about the review by "SC" of November 17, 2004. It's fine, SC, if you don't agree with Smiley's opinion piece/political analysis of the red state/blue state divide **PUBLISHED IN SLATE.com, NOT THIS BOOK!** but criticizing THIS book for a political opinion published elsewhere is ridiculous. It is completely inappropriate of SC to leave this sort of negative and completely irrelevant comment about Smiley's OTHER WRITINGS when SC is supposed to be reviewing THIS BOOK!
For example, in my opinion (and in my dad's, as well!) William F. Buckley has contemptible political opinions. Nevertheless, my dad loved his books and would never mix his dislike of Buckley's politics with his criticism or praise of Buckley's fiction. SC has posted this same commentary UNRELATED TO EACH BOOK THAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE REVIEWED under almost all of Ms Smiley's books. SC's "thought police" activities have no place here - attacking an author for political opinions unrelated to the book being reviewed is contrary to the intent of the rating program.
Rating: 
Summary: Well Written Story About Dubious People
Review: I've had the pleasure of reading a number of Jane Smiley's novels and have often come away with a common reaction. I think she is a great storyteller and always finds a way to write a story that holds my interest. The one weakness or at least the one thing I don't like about most of Smiley's books is that she always fails to create appealing characters. This time, our protagonist is a realtor named Joe Stratford. He's well-liked in the community but already has gone through one failed marriage and is sleeping with another man's wife who happens to be the daughter of one of his clients and business partners. Along the way, (perhaps a commentary on the vapid 1980's) our main character manages to snort coke with yet another love interest and be incredibly self-absorbed and gullible. He happens to be the most likeable character. The most memorable character is Marcus Burns, who claims to be an ex-IRS agent and has a host of hare-brained, get-rich-quick schemes. While I will refrain from giving away the story and ending, you end up getting a book that moves well, a plot that's interesting, but a story that contains a whole bunch of people that you wouldn't want as your friends. Given all of the recent attention on accounting, and other business scandals, it's a timely look back on a decade when some of the country lost common sense principles, but it didn't leave me all the warm after reading the book. In short, Smiley is a great writer who can get your attention and keep it. She is adept at writing about a host of different subjects, but I do hope she creates more positive characters in at least one of her books.
Rating: 
Summary: beautiful bits, but boring overall
Review: I, too, am a Smiley fan: the Age of Grief is spectacular (and Moo hilarious), and this book started along similarly spare, beautiful lines. And the goal: to probe big issues of trust, infidelity (as always, with her), and business through reallllly small time real estate in northern PA - it's a noble one. It seemed like she got the details right, and Joe, her flat, dull, straightforward hero, was to me at her most engaging when he talked about the random sales he was making at the beginning of the book. My two largest problems:
- too talky. The whole thing is dialogue, essentially, and dialogue ultimately about a particular real estate transaction in far too much detail. We're supposed to get the hang of Marcus (the interloping deal-crazy source of action) and Joe through their talk, but it's just talk, no distinctive voices, no distinctive observations, long paragraphs, etc. The exception here is Felicity, the temptress, but her sing-songy weirdness was, though distinctive, not very plausible. Or alluring.
- too flat. Exhibit A here is all the attention given to food. The food's always boring. It's burgers and fries and other sandwiches and potato chips. And yet people are always going to eat, where they can have long, long conversations over uninteresting, uninterestingly described food, which nonetheless earns pages of copy. So in the end, I stopped caring. I did finish the book, and good on Jane Smiley for putting me in a world, and engaging difficult issues, but this book should have been more written. And shorter. Three stars, though, only because I hold her to very high standards. You won't feel like someone stole your time if you read this.
Rating:
Summary: better than Moo, on par with A Thousand Acres
Review: Jane Smiley tackles different material with almost every novel. Her Pulitzer-winning novel A Thousand Acres was a deft portayal of the demise of a family farm, her last effort explored the world of horse racing, and now she brings us into the 1980s world of real estate development in Good Faith. While her novels are captivating cultural history, it's her characters that remain her strength. I know Joe. Sure, my friend isn't named Joe and isn't a real estate agent, but I know decent people like Joe who have a gift for the largely unrecognized jobs they do and who realize, at some point, that they're doing pretty well financially. In fact, recent polls suggest the vast majority of us, even those who are statistically lower class or in the upper percetages of incomes consider ourselves middle class but still not as well off as our friends. And I know a Marcus, too, who's a smooth-talking, good-natured fellow who inspires loyalty in people for no logical reason. And I know a Felicity or two who married because nearly everyone does but who doesn't quite fit the frat house her homelife seems to be. I know a few Betty and Gordon couples and the Davids as well. So, Smiley's characters have a vague familiarity, even as they each are distinct and engaging. Even more importantly, Smiley understands the small, odd traits that people find attractive or off-putting in each other. When, for instance, Felicity reveals that she's not kind but that she is affectionate, we understand something about human behavior that we hadn't quite noticed before. Little moments like this one drive the novel seemingly effortlessly. While I had no knowledge of and little interest in real estate, the characters and the impending demise or success of their business dealings drew me in. By the end, I even found the so-called topic of the novel relevant to recent economic events in the stock market and to political issues such as allowing for individual investment choices for social security. Now, thanks to Smiley, I also understand anew how people are shaped by economic events and how we make some of the major decisions of our lives. Good Faith is a great read. The overt topic may be real estate development, but the novel's real subjects are relationships in many varieties. Just as you didn't need to know about Iowa farms to appreciate A Thousand Acres nor know about dentistry to enjoy The Age of Grief, if you're interested in a good story with realistic characters, you'll like Good Faith. I hear, by the way, that a film version of The Age of Grief is forthcoming. To my mind, her novellas (that one and Ordinary Love & Good Will) are Smiley's strongest writing.
Rating:
Summary: A former IRS agent becomes involved with a rich-quick scheme
Review: Narrator Richard Poe's successful career in theater and TV translates well to the audio format in general and to this avid story in particular as he brings to life Smiley's story of a New Jersey realtor who is divorced and seeking a fresh start. A former IRS agent becomes involved with a rich-quick scheme and the two find themselves on the verge of either bankruptcy or riches beyond belief in this thriller.
Rating: 
Summary: Another Boring Smiley Book
Review: Our book club of 10 women were unanimous in disliking this book. Many wondered why she was a Pulitzer-prize-winning author. The book rambles on with way too much detail about everything and doesn't even manage to provide insightful or entertaining observations about the real estate industry. The characters are all unloveable and forgettable. The action moves at a glacial pace. I may never read another Smiley book, after being bored by Horse Heaven and now this.
Rating:
Summary: She continues to break out of genre after genre
Review: Outrageous versatility is not something we readers look for in our favorite authors, but Jane Smiley, in book after book after book, refuses to be pinned down. She can write pathos, tragedy, slapstick, satire, mystery... Where will it end? Never and nowhere, we hope.
This is a novel about greed in the 80s, that decade when it seemed the Good Times would roll on forever. The story concerns an amiable, trusting, 'good' man who is lured down the shady paths of easy money. It's a story about principles, ambition viewed through the gauzy curtain that hides (not very well) The American Dream.
Smiley scores again.
Rating:
Summary: Making money in consuming '80s
Review: REVIEWED BY ERIN MENDELL ...
Imagine a world where tapas are still exotic, where only a few - those who studied art in Spain - have discovered dried cranberries and no one drinks bottled water. Remember the '80s?
"Good Faith," Jane Smiley's 12th book, follows Joe Stratford, a moderately successful real estate agent in small-town New Jersey, as he is spurred by Marcus, a fashionable newcomer, to invest in developing a high-end neighborhood. Two years into President Reagan's first term, people are ready to buy houses again. They want to live on golf courses. The company they form with Gordon, Joe's surrogate father and a local developer, will make billions.
Their venture is, of course, doomed, and there are pleny of inside jokes of hindsight. Marcus' sister Jane explains junk bonds to Joe (wink). Gold is the safest place to put your money (wink-wink). Deregulating savings and loans will make us all rich in a low-risk way (wink-wink-wink).
Oh, the dramatic irony.
Miss Smiley is good at doom. She does not doom relationships nor businesses. She dooms people. Her characters lose their reputations, their lovers, their dogs. Their most sacred ideals are turned upside down. And when they are bloodied and writhing on their tiled floors trimmed with marble, the writer kicks them one more time for good measure. It's tragedy (the Greek kind), but she avoids melodrama by having Joe, the narrator, present his story with a sigh, as if it couldn't have happened any other way.
Unfortunately, a story - even one as well-made as this one - about real estate has great potential for being boring. And for all its foreshadowing of how the '80s end, "Good Faith" has none of the eerie foreboding that makes "A Thousand Acres," which also centers on land and for which Miss Smiley won the Pulitzer Prize, so exhilarating.
By Page 100, the reader has peeked into the financial statements, bank accounts and mortgage applications for several homebuyers. There's a point to it -that this is the way Joe has been trained to categorize people, the same way Brett Easton Ellis would reduce them to a pair of designer sunglasses and a tan; that this begins a new financial era. But it's a dry point. The details pile onto one another so that it's hard to remember - or care - what the last thing that happened was.
Struggling to climb out from under all those details are some beautiful descriptions. Joe has an affair with Felicity, Gordon's married daughter, whom he has known for decades. Parked outside her house one evening, he is hit by the life she leads most of the time, with her husband, Hank, and their two sons.
"The life Felicity and Hank and Clark and Jason lived on Nut Hollow Road involved sports equipment lying in the yard, a light on in the upstairs window when all the cars were gone, a half-full wheelbarrow next to a flower bed, a sweater draped over the porch railing - many things going on, some of them not finished, tasks put off in favor of, I am sure, more interesting things." Thoughts like that get to breathe when Miss Smiley allows the reader to forget she's making a point about how badly this decade will end.
That point itself manages to be both timely and far removed. The real estate bubble might as well be the tech bubble. References to round-trip sales evoke Enron Corp. When Marcus tells Joe, "'Accountants are in the business of making sure the books balance. That's all. You could [borrow money from a company], but if the books balanced, the accountant would have done his job,'" the ghost of Arthur Andersen lingers over the page.
Despite its relevance, "Good Faith" is hard to relate to because most of the people aren't compelling. Joe isn't all that interesting. He's a nice, trustworthy guy, which is a fine thing for him to be if he's going to marry your daughter but not if he's going to be your tour guide for 400 pages. Marcus is a man who's a little too coordinated. Even Felicity, who at first seems like she has the potential to be intriguing, turns out to be only unhappy and weird, albeit charmingly so.
The characters with the best ability to draw the reader in - a couple, both named David, who have things other than real estate and development on their minds - spend too little time onstage, and when they're around, Miss Smiley often falls back on [the typical]. They spend their weekends fixing up their second house.
They have a friend in New York who needs a place to store costumes. They travel in the same circle as an up-and-coming designer named Yves. And because they are usually referred to as "the Davids," their identities get lost. It's not clear why the Davids are around other than, perhaps, to remind the reader that ... (male) couples are the harbinger of trends.
Amid all the unhappiness, the saddest part of Joe's story is how content he is. His high school girlfriend taught him how to dress; Gordon got him started in business; Felicity decided they would have an affair. Joe is brought deeper and deeper into Marcus' development idea without being dazzled by the billions of dollars Marcus keeps bringing up, his motivation being that he is dazzled by Marcus' friendship.
Joe is a man whom things happen to, and though he eventually begins to pursue the project (and his life) actively instead of just reactively, that proves a short-term development brought on by a desire to be like someone else, Marcus. In the end, nothing has changed, and the protagonist hasn't developed into a person.
Rating:
Summary: Bland and Boring
Review: This book is so tedious, filled with pages and pages of boring superfluous details, that it is hard to get through. The promise of a great ending never materializes. Save your time and read a good financial thriller by Stephen Frey instead.
Rating: 
Summary: too much, too little
Review: Too much graphic sex, predictable ending, and disappointing treatment of what could have been an enjoyable novel on the greedy 80's.
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