Is there any topic on which Jane Smiley cannot write? I don't think so. After reading her two novellas, "Ordinary Love" and "Good Will," I am further convinced no one writes of the ordinariness of life better than Jane. And when she writes of Life's travails, there is always a glimmer of hope; unlike Joan Didion, darlings, who makes Sylvia Plath seem optimistic by comparison!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"Ordinary Love," the better of the two, explores a woman and her grown children. The woman has lost almost everything, due to an infidelity years before, and has managed to make a life for herself. Since this is Jane Smiley, there are plenty of references to life in the country, cooking, vegetables, all culminating in the most fluid and lyrical prose, this side of poetry.
On some level, I found "Good Will" less satisfying, but it is more penetrating in its examination of parents and children, and how the decisions of one--the parents deciding to live a communal, almost Amish-like lifestyle, versus the child, their boy, Tommy's conflict over this, which is realized by a series of ways in which he acts out, culminating in them taking what I felt was the inevitable action.
No one does all this better than Jane Smiley. I loved every page, and wish each novella had gone on longer. The good news is I have not gone through all the Smiley oeuvre, so there are still some Smileys left to go!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Get with the program, girls, and start reading Jane! Next to Miss Austen, she is the most literary Jane there is!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Keep writing, Jane!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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