Helpful Score: 1
While a previous reader found these stories only average, I found them to be an excellent read with memorable characters and interesting plots.
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Ordinary Love and Good Will
Ordinary Love and Good Will
Author:
In two powerfully affecting novellas, Jane Smiley returns to the form that she employed with such expert grace in The Age of Grief and takes us into the complex interiors of two disparate marriages, a bitter union long ended and a loving one soon to be transformed. — “My experience,” says Rachel Kinsella in “Ord... more »,” “is that you make room for anything you want, if you want it enough.” At a reunion with her grown children, she contemplates the transforming events of the last two decades of her life and the remarkable fact of her children’s survival. But when, in an unguarded moment, she recalls for them the “ancient agitations” of her divorce from their brilliant pediatrician father, she finds herself bitterly repaid for her candor.
“I admit I like to be prepared for things,” says Bob Miller in “Good Will.” He has carefully designed a self-sufficient life for himself, his wife, and their small son on a farm in an idyllic Pennsylvania valley, where they grow their own food, build their own furniture, make their own clothes, and look down upon the nearest town and “catch sight of the twentieth century without having to participate in it.” But he finds that the pride and pleasure he takes in his craftsmanship, in the know-how and self-mastery that he has woven into the very fabric of his life, are no bulwark against the effect his cherished isolation begins to have on his family.
Author:
In two powerfully affecting novellas, Jane Smiley returns to the form that she employed with such expert grace in The Age of Grief and takes us into the complex interiors of two disparate marriages, a bitter union long ended and a loving one soon to be transformed. — “My experience,” says Rachel Kinsella in “Ord... more »,” “is that you make room for anything you want, if you want it enough.” At a reunion with her grown children, she contemplates the transforming events of the last two decades of her life and the remarkable fact of her children’s survival. But when, in an unguarded moment, she recalls for them the “ancient agitations” of her divorce from their brilliant pediatrician father, she finds herself bitterly repaid for her candor.
“I admit I like to be prepared for things,” says Bob Miller in “Good Will.” He has carefully designed a self-sufficient life for himself, his wife, and their small son on a farm in an idyllic Pennsylvania valley, where they grow their own food, build their own furniture, make their own clothes, and look down upon the nearest town and “catch sight of the twentieth century without having to participate in it.” But he finds that the pride and pleasure he takes in his craftsmanship, in the know-how and self-mastery that he has woven into the very fabric of his life, are no bulwark against the effect his cherished isolation begins to have on his family.
ISBN-13: 9780394577722
ISBN-10: 0394577728
Publication Date: 10/14/1989
Pages: 197
Rating: 1
ISBN-10: 0394577728
Publication Date: 10/14/1989
Pages: 197
Rating: 1
3 stars, based on 1 rating
Publisher: Knopf
Book Type: Hardcover
Other Versions: Paperback
Reviews: Member | Amazon | Write a Review
Book Type: Hardcover
Other Versions: Paperback
Reviews: Member | Amazon | Write a Review
Top Member Book Reviews
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A chronicle of family love.
Two novellas in one book: "With this volume, Jane Smiley ratifies her claim as one of her generation's most eloquent chroniclers of ordinary familial love."
The New York Times
The New York Times
Genres:
- Literature & Fiction >> General >> Contemporary
- Literature & Fiction >> World Literature >> United States
- Literature & Fiction >> Authors, A-Z >> ( S ) >> Smiley, Jane
