Good Faith
By Jane Smiley
Knopf, 417 pp., $26
f it’s a little late to be reviewing Good
Faith — a novel released this spring — it isn’t too late to be
recommending it this summer. You can file it under “beach read”: smart, funny,
sexy, and terrifically observant, a page-turner despite its 400-plus pages but with a
head on its shoulders to set you thinking on the way we lived then to maybe
explain the way we live now.
That’s “we” so long as you’re a
member of the mid- to upper middle class in all-white, totally whitebread
America. That’s “then” as in 1982, days when
day trading was the latest thing, S&Ls weren’t belly-up, real estate values were ready
to sky-rocket, and a 40-year-old, divorced man with no children could live the
very good life on $72,000 a year.
Welcome, then, to the infant world of junk bonds and T-bill futures, faux
finishes and “teardowns,” risotto,
gnocchi, and bruschetta on the menu of what was your neighborhood Italian
restaurant, and a U.S. market for bottled water
just waiting to be tapped.
Meet Jane Smiley’s Joe Stratford, real estate agent in an unnamed state
not unlike New Jersey. He’s shrewd but not unfair. Nor is he unnice. He’s just a
guy who likes “selling old houses to decent people …
and then watching as individual lives developed in those houses”; a guy who
understands the art of the deal but a guy equally “good at shifting the balance when
things go sour” (everybody happy?); a guy
good at doing business for and with his partner Gordon Baldwin (who’s in
“sales”: houses, land, cows, antique
doorknobs, you name it), good at keeping Gottfried Nuelle (a demanding, high-quality
home builder) halfway satisfied (some of the time), and good at keeping
Baldwin’s daughter Felicity Ornquist for a few months very happy (in
and out of bed and unbeknownst to Felicity’s husband).
Stratford’s a good son too to his aging parents,
parents who are “the perfect example of the idea that
you can live up to your ideals every single day of
your life, absolutely follow the book, and still get
the wrong child.”
Wrong child? Well, Stratford’s no saint
(adulterer, healthy drinker, no stranger to making some big bucks), and
he doesn’t claim to be a saint (though he’s straight-up honest
all way ’round). But those strict (yet ungloomy) parents of his …
Yes, they follow the book, the Good Book, to the letter as members of some
unnamed Protestant sect and live out their latter
days reading the Bible aloud, praying together aloud, discussing salvation “along with
the price of tomatoes and chicken,” and
supporting some missionaries oversees. Secure in
the belief that the Lord’s path is a “source of
perennial joy,” they’ve got one thing to fear
and it isn’t those dreadful Roman Catholics. It’s the wages of sin.
“People do tend to spoil things,
don’t they,” Stratford’s mother one day
announces cheerfully. To which Stratford’s father
adds, “We can’t live in paradise, because man
is fallen. He felled himself with his own hand. Redemption doesn’t take place in
this world, Scripture says, so whatever looks like paradise can’t be, and so it isn’t. If
we look for it to be, then we are deceived, and Satan is at work.”
At work, then: Marcus Burns and his plan for “paradise”: Salt Key Farm,
a wealthy family’s former country spread (mansion, stables, gardens, the
works), which Stratford gets his hands on to divvy up as lots (middle- to
upper-middle-income homes) but Burns has his eye on to divvy
up as high-end megahouses, a golf course, a clubhouse, a set of chi-chi shops, an
elementary school — upscale all of it and never
mind the unobtained county permits and never mind that this quiet landscape of
rolling farmland and unpretentious villages ain’t seen nothing like it. But it’s what the
weekenders from New York City are in the market for, so it’s what Burns is in the
business of trying to build. His method of
financing? Stratford ain’t seen nothing like it: shady
but legal from the looks of it, the very latest in creative fund-raising and loan transfers.
And because Burns is a former IRS agent, he knows the rules you can break and the
rules you can’t, knows how and how not to look on paper, how to bring in the banks, how
to bring in the investors, and how to promise anybody
anything so long as what he’s promised happens to be what those anybodies
think they want — in short, the standard ropes, the new ropes (according to the
gospel of Reagan, according to the rules of deregulation), and then some.
Stratford’s no dummy. He falls in with Burns, but Burns falls short of the
promised windfall. In fact, he’s a thief. And his sister Jane’s an even better thief.
(And Felicity? Read and see.) So Stratford loses his shirt. And this will come as
anybody’s surprise?
The real surprise is this novel’s managing to make all this entertaining,
believable, accurate to the smallest detail and, in a real triumph of
characterization, make the worst of the book’s
“sinners” not wholly unlikable. (Burns
the irredeemable, for one, is no easy man to root for, so why do we, sort of,
sometimes?) But Joe Stratford … We’re to believe he shows not one ounce of
ill-will throughout these pages and especially not in the closing pages, when he’s very
nearly wiped out, living back home with his parents, being precisely the “right
child” after all? That he comes to no other
conclusion, after all he’s been through, except to say, in summary, that
there’s “grace in the material world” as he
follows the figure of Felicity 10 years later down a ski slope?
Good Faith is a quick read but maybe too compressed in its
closing scenes, too lacking in climactic punch to balance its lengthily laid-out
rising action. For its bedroom scenes alone, though, healthier examples of
full-on, adult, unneurotic sexuality you couldn’t have found this spring or
won’t find this summer.
