About book Ordinary Love And Good Will: Two Novellas (1992)
I’ve been debating whether to dive into Jane Smiley’s Last Hundred Years trilogy. It’s such a big commitment, following a multigenerational family from 1920 to 2019 through three long novels. And I really didn’t love A Thousand Acres, the novel that won her a Pulitzer. (Not because it was poorly conceived or written, by any means, just that the subject matter is pretty dark. It’s a tragedy, after all – her interpretation of King Lear.) But reading Ordinary Love and Good Will has me leaning toward making that leap. Smiley is a master, no doubt about it.Ordinary Love and Good Will are two novellas, written and set in the mid-80s, though they don’t feel tied to that era. In Ordinary Love we meet Rachel, a 52-year-old mother of five adult children, three of whom happen to be home on the 20th anniversary of the dissolution of their once seemingly perfect, happy family. As they revisit the past, Rachel sees what follows her separation and divorce from the children’s perspective as she never has: “What they say creates a vast and complicated but vividly articulated new object in my mind, the history of my children in my absence, at the mercy of their father.”Rachel realizes she has given her children “the two cruelest gifts I had to give, which are these, the experience of perfect family happiness, and the certain knowledge that it could not last.”Good Will is told from the perspective of a father. Bob and his wife are raising their young son on a farm in rural Pennsylvania. They are fully self-sufficient, their lives self-contained – they grow their own food, spin and weave their own wool, make their own furniture. The family lives without a car, telephone or television, with no necessary connection to the outside world except their son’s schooling. Needless to say, things start to go awry and the family’s Eden is upended.Both novellas end with a chastened narrator realizing the consequences of following their own desires. “The moral of all wish tales,” Bob says, “is that, though wishes express power or desire, their purpose is to reveal ignorance: the more fulfilled wishes, the more realized ignorance.”One of the things I find most interesting and impressive about Jane Smiley is how she focuses super consciously on the form and function of her writing. (Maybe all writers do, but not so publicly? She consciously set out, for example, to write a novel in every genre, and has written award-winningly in just about every form too – from short stories to novellas to novels to nonfiction to screenplays. And her meticulously constructed new trilogy is a whole other thing.)With Ordinary Love and Good Will, she told the NY Times, “I did set out to pair the point of view of a father with that of a mother. And I consciously constructed one of these novellas as a more masculine narrative – essentially linear – and the other as more feminine, in which things are hidden and then revealed. 'Ordinary Love' is like looking at a rose, where the form unfolds around the center.”The novella form allows for a condensed, sharp focus on one theme that comes to a point in the way a short story does, but with more room to dive deep and explore around than a short story allows, while the length makes it easier to sustain our interest than a 400-page novel might. So the form serves her – and us – well. But it’s the power and perception of her writing that makes these two novellas together a work of art. It’s her wisdom and sympathy that make her work so very worthy of our time. I’m leaning toward yes on the trilogy.
Actually, a 3.5 rating. I had a little trouble maintaining interest in "Ordinary Love" at first, as it seemed to be a typical family saga. But it grew on me, and by the end, I think there's fodder for thought. "Good Will" was more interesting from the start. A couple has chosen a life removed from civilization, where they grow their own food and make everything they need: house, furniture, clothing. They have a young son who they are raising in their removed lifestyle. The consequences of course are mixed, good and bad. As the events unfold, not only do you begin to wonder, but so do the main characters. The dynamics between husband, wife and son evolve....Both tales are told in the first person. With "Ordinary Love" the point of view of narrator can verge on the annoying scale; with "Good Will," I had other questions about the self-narration. I'm reading this for a book club discussion and am looking forward to it. I think this is one of those books that the discussion may greatly add to the experience.
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I hesitate to give such an accomplished writer only two stars, but for my interests, the subjects of these two novellas were “just okay.” These books may hold greater appeal to those whose family lives are more similar to the protagonists’ (indeed, this book was suggested to me by a person with a very different life than my own). There’s no doubt the writer beautifully crafts the intricacies of human emotion, such as in this passage from “Ordinary Love”:A year went by, and I fell out of love wit
—Peacegal
Two novellas. The first, Ordinary Love, was an extended short story and felt more like a poem than a story. The second, Good Will, had a plot, a mystery, if you will. This second one was fascinating. Jane Smiley's writing style is expansively descriptive. She takes in all of the senses and is particularly sensitive to those "gut feelings", the sensations taking place inside. If it were porn, and it's not, she'd be trying to describe how it feels to have an orgasm. Her descriptions of viewing her children, as infants, children, and, later, adults, almost gives me, childless as I am, a sense of how it feels to have borne children and the physical sensations of the love the mother carries for them.
—Phyllis
“…I, too, have done the thing that I least wanted to do… I have given my children the two cruelest gifts I had to give, which are these, the experience of perfect family happiness, and the certain knowledge that it could not last.” This quote from page 94 of Ordinary Love, one of two novellas making up Ordinary Love and Good Will, encapsulates a major theme of this virtuoso volume: parental love and the nearly impossible task of nurturing children fully as a flawed adult trying to remain true to your own journey. However, though their themes are similar, these first-person narratives come at them from opposite directions: Ordinary Love from the vantage point of a mother, Rachel, who lost control of her young children (and even knowledge of their whereabouts) for years after confessing to her husband that she was having an affair; and Good Will from that of a father, Robert, who controlled almost every aspect of his family’s life by moving them off the grid to a self-sufficient farm. Both stories build to an emotional crisis but, again, in opposite ways: Ordinary Love unfolds in a “spiral” fashion through emotional reveals; Good Will unfolds linearly, through physical events. The two protagonists wind up in different circumstances at the end of their respective stories—the mother united with her offspring in the home she loves; the father robbed of everything that gave his life meaning, save his wife and son—yet they reach similar conclusions, each coming to a chastened realization of the impact of their own limitations on their children. This opposite/same structure is interesting in and of itself. And what both novellas share, of course, are interesting, full-fledged characters and complex emotional insights, hallmarks of Smiley’s writing.
—Diane
