By Delia O’Hara
Chicago Sun-Times
After the novelist Jane Smiley won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 forA Thousand Acres, her Midwestern reworking of Shakespeare’s King Lear, she was, she says, “tempted by the upscale,” but in hercase, it never seemed to take hold.
She bought a Lexus but decided it had too much power; she wound up with a Subaru. She bought a few sets of expensive china, but “the one I really love is a Pfaltzgraff that cost me $70,” she says.
Smiley has bought some houses, too, and she has liked them all, but they have not been very fancy, either. Houses say a lot about a person, she says, and hers have all said: “‘Catch as catch can.’ They say, ‘Here’s someone who would rather get a bargain than a nice house.’ Fortunately, my boyfriend is a wonderful builder. He fixes the things that weren’t quite right when I bought the house I live in now.”
Choosing a house, Smiley says, is more like “choosing a career, a spouse or even a horse” than buying a car. “You can put on a car or take it off, you never exhaust your fantasies. It’s hard to do that with a house. A house is you, in a lot of ways. I’m more comfortable with the downscale.”
And so it is that Smiley, a virtuoso storyteller who has written everything from a locked-door mystery (Duplicate Keys) to a novel in which the most endearing characters are horses (Horse Heaven), now takes on the American Dream, as well as lust, greed and envy, in her latest novel, Good Faith (Knopf, $26).
Smiley’s narrator and protagonist in Good Faith, which opens in 1982, is Joe Stratford, a Realtor, who goes from selling modest homes to modest people in a slow, beautiful, semi-rural Pennsylvania backwater, to engaging in risky and legally dubious land speculation.
The snake in the garden is Marcus Burns, a former IRS agent who blows into Joe’s sleepy valley like a hot wind. The main thing Burns seems to have learned from his old job is that plenty of people cheat and don’t get caught. He tells Joe, “Money these days is like water. It can’t stop looking for a place to go.”
For Smiley, who lives in California with her three children, three dogs and 16 horses, Marcus Burns is the embodiment of the 1980s. She loathes the decade, even from this distance. She dislikes the present Bush Administration intensely, too — the New York Times letters editor has stopped acknowledging the nearly daily letters Smiley sends protesting GWB’s activities, from “the stolen election of 2000” on, she says.
But “I date the end of good faith to the ’80s,” she says. “I wept the night Ronald Reagan was elected. I detested him, and I wasn’t wrong. He was the originator, the herald of everything to come. My particular bete noire is deregulation, of the savings and loan industry, of the banking industry (and other industries). That was the real moment when everything was thrown up into the air.”
Of course, the ’90s were fairly wild, too. Smiley says that when she researched The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton, her 1998 novel about the murderous, chaotic 1850s episode known as “Bleeding Kansas,” she learned that even that horrific period was preceded by real estate speculation.
“This is the way things work in our country. It’s always the same. Somebody comes along with a great idea, there’s a frenzy of speculation, with everybody trying to get on the bus and make that billion dollars” until the whole thing collapses, to everyone’s sorrow. “It’s a common feature of American life and literature,” she says.
The human story Smiley wanted to tell was of the betrayal that Joe feels when his new best friend, Marcus, takes advantage of him.
“When Judas betrays Christ, it’s the worst crime of two millenia. I’m not putting Joe in the same realm, but why does betrayal hurt the most?” she says.
The most fundamental theme in Good Faith addresses a larger question she asks herself all the time now, Smiley says, on behalf not only of herself but also of the direction she sees our nation taking–and it goes back to that $70 set of Pfaltzgraff dishes.
“The 32 years since I was 21 have passed in a flash,” she says. “The success, the publications, the money, raising my children — whatever good thing it was — how ephemeral it was! What if I had focused on getting a billion dollars by lying, cheating, stealing? I would have betrayed myself and lost myself. If I had gotten my billion dollars, what good would it be?”
Chicago Sun-Times 5/12/03