Fiction: I remember loving A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, and The Age of Grief too, a beautifully crafted novella. And I've admired the fact that Smiley has continued to experiment with form, refusing to settle in a single genre. But her latest outing - a look at when the heady 1980s trickled down to small-town America - has problems, writes Molly McCloskey
Narrator Joe Stratford is 40, divorced, and "spiralling inward" in Nut County, somewhere along the eastern seaboard. He's a moderately successful real-estate agent enjoying a bland contentment. Then Marcus Burns blows into town. A smooth-talking, ex-IRS agent-cum-property developer, Marcus is the embodiment of blithe 1980s greed: "It's like everything in the world all of a sudden turned into money, and whatever it is you just pass it back and forth and it's all the same."
Marcus has a scheme - turning a 580-acre estate into a luxury golf and residential development - that he promises will make them all billionaires. En route, he manages to persuade Joe, Joe's boss Gordon and Gordon's son Bobby to part with large sums of money. He also teaches Joe to think big, which will spell either Joe's salvation or his downfall.
The book's suspense rides on the outcome of the Salt Key development project and on the answer to the question of whether Marcus is a swindler or a genius sent to rescue them all from provincial mediocrity. But the end is fairly obvious from the start, and the denouement no surprise. What never fails to surprise is Joe's continuing credulity in the face of Marcus's transparent palaver.
Along the way, Joe tries to get a love life. As the novel opens, he embarks on an affair with the married Felicity, who happens to be Gordon's daughter. Felicity is one of those plucky female characters (like the kind Larry McMurtry creates) who are permitted to skirt the ethical ambiguities of certain acts - such as adultery - by virtue of being just plain folk. Her boundless sexual appetite and lack of emotional complexity are presumably meant to render her an untamed innocent, but she's more an irritating rube, and it is impossible to take her love affair with Joe seriously.
More interesting is Susan, Felicity's successor in Joe's affections. Just back from living in Spain, Susan is full of superficial urbanity, and poor Joe - new to the role of social climber - falls utterly under her spell.
I kept wishing Smiley had opted for satire, as she has plenty of potentially great material in Nut County's hokey version of 1980s hubris. She could've brought it off beautifully. Here is Joe, contemplating his to-do list for the weekend:
Was that a guy's sort of list, apart from the furnace filters? It occurred to me that my guyness might rise if I just hired a cleaning lady, but as soon as I thought of that, I thought instantly that she might not do the sort of meticulous job that I would do myself. Then I wondered if that was a tycoonish sort of thought (no, of course not) and what a tycoon would do about that, and then I thought, Well, he would probably yell at someone.
But apart from such isolated moments, Smiley seems to view her characters with as much earnestness as they view themselves.
Against the odds, she does succeed in making the world of real estate riveting, even down to the byzantine process of acquiring planning permission. I wanted to know what would happen with Salt Key (though there was little doubt as to the broader outcome, my curiosity about the details endured).
But wanting to know what happens next isn't the same as caring what happens, and the characters never became real enough to elicit that concern.
Good Faith, despite the claims of the press release, is not Jane Smiley at her "very best". Read her very best instead.
Molly McCloskey is a writer and critic
Good Faith. By Jane Smiley, Faber & Faber, 417pp, £16.99 hbk, £12.99 pbk