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Good Faith

Author Jane Smiley

Paperback

$13.95 US

Knopf | Anchor

5.18"W x 7.99"H x 0.88"D | 12 oz | 24 per carton

On sale May 11, 2004 | 432 Pages | 9780385721059

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Fiction > General Fiction

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres comes a “smashing...fascinating” novel (The New York Times Book Review) that conjures all the American obsessions of the 1980s: sex, greed, envy, real estate, and the American dream.

In her subversively funny and genuinely moving new novel, Jane Smiley nails down several American preoccupations with the expertise of a master carpenter.

Forthright, likable Joe Stratford is the kind of local businessman everybody trusts, for good reason. But it’s 1982, and even in Joe’s small town, values are in upheaval: not just property values, either. Enter Marcus Burns, a would-be master of the universe whose years with the IRS have taught him which rules are meant to be broken. Before long he and Joe are new best friends—and partners in an investment venture so complex that no one may ever understand it. Add to this Joe’s roller coaster affair with his mentor’s married daughter. The result is as suspenseful and entertaining as any of Jane Smiley’s fiction.

“Smashing. . . . Fascinating. . . . Extremely subtle and nuanced. . . . [It has the] power to beguile and enthrall.” —The New York Times Book Review

“There seems to be nothing Smiley can’t write about fabulously well; her insights startle, dazzle.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“An irresistible novel of bad manners, a meditation on love and money that Jane Austen might have enjoyed, if she could have handled the sex.” —Time

“Everything about Good Faith is in perfect move-in condition. . . . [It] displays all the remarkable attention to detail that’s the hallmark of Smiley’s work. . . . Smiley has invested her best talent in this work, and you can buy it in good faith.” —The Christian Science Monitor

“A vindication of the traditional American novel. . . . It depicts its disquiet by means of rich, seamless prose, scenic immediacy and tight plotting. It’s a true winner.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Only a writer of consummate craftsmanship and scope could write a novel about a series of real estate deals in a small town and make it so fully satisfying as to be thrilling. Jane Smiley has done it. . . . [Her] range is broad, her technique masterful. . . . [Good Faith is] a cautionary prequel just right for our times. And great fun, to boot.” —Los Angeles Times

“Natural, convincing and moving.” —Chicago Tribune

“I admire this novel in so many ways I hardly know where to start. . . . The suspense Smiley generates is about on a par with a hundred Stephen King creatures coming out of the woods. . . . [Smiley] is one of our most Dickensian novelists, her imagination is prodigious, her observations exact, and the wealth of fascinating people inside her head a national treasure.” —Donald E. Westlake, The Washington Post Book World

“Striking. . . . Well written, amusing.” —The Wall Street Journal

“[A] lusty, testosterone-pumped tale, which both revisits Smiley’s obsession with infidelity and underlines her remarkable ability to humanize an industry. . . . You’re sucked in [by] this story’s power.” —Elle

“A literary property that will only appreciate over time.” —Daily News (New York)

“Scathing, uproarious. . . . All of Smiley’s characters have a sharp vigor that fuels the book’s energy. . . . With its surprises and reversals, and its robust realism pushed step-by-step toward comic hyperbole, Good Faith affirms one’s faith in the venerable virtues of the satirical novel.” —The Seattle Times

“Smiley is never less than brilliant, and this is a clever, classy and utterly enthralling look back in I-told-you-so amusement.” —Daily Mail

“Seductive. . . . Frisky. . . . Hilariously deadpan . . . a beguiling cautionary tale. . . . Like a sturdy, well-planned house, it makes room for everybody, and it ought to last a long, long time.” —The Miami Herald

“With an arsenal of talents that seem equipped for everything from high drama to uproarious satire, [Smiley’s] charm and versatility are outdone only by her narrative confidence.” —The Boston Globe

“[Smiley] is so expert in the vernacular of real estate sales you feel like giving her a license by the end of the book. . . . [She] has imagined herself so deeply into [her protagonist] that we can almost feel the way the guy wiggles his toes in his black silk business socks.” —Chicago Sun-Times

“Smiley’s superb novel does for estate agency what The West Wing does for politics—make it, against the odds, enthralling and sexy. . . . Good Faith has some wonderfully funny characters and is wise and touching.” —Mail on Sunday

“Captivating. . . . Tightly focused. . . . A major piece of literary property.” —The Christian Science Monitor

“Precise and unshowy, Pulitzer Prize winner Smiley populates her fiction with convincing mothers, lovers, sons and sisters (not to mention houses), and there’s real heart in this tale of a material world in the making. A high point in the genre of real-estate realism.” —Harpers & Queen, Beach Read of the Month

“A wonderful exposition of a decadent decade.” —Good Housekeeping

“Riveting. . . . Smiley has remained faithful to an ideal of sheer readability, to the Jamesian dictum that a novelist’s principal task is to be ‘interesting.’ Her artistry in doing so, in populating her fiction with interesting characters doing equally interesting things, is camouflaged by how easy she makes it all look.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Smiley’s mastery of language and her talent for plot and character make this story resonate with meaning long after its supremely satisfying final page.” —Sainsbury’s Magazine, Book of the Month

“Entertaining. . . . Perceptive. . . . Although Smiley could make even Whitewater understandable, it’s her characters—flawed, complex, totally convincing—who pull you through the pages. . . . Good Faith is on the money.” —The Orlando Sentinel

“Smiley is as restless and uninhibited by her own creative history as a novelist can be. . . . She has set herself a new task with every book. . . . Her technical mastery of fiction—her genius for dialogue and for shades of character, her perfect control of events, and her ability to create suspense out of a snowflake’s descent—has meant that all are admirable. . . . Good Faith has a new world to display and a new vocabulary for Smiley, with her usual miraculous powers of mimicry.” —Daily Telegraph

“On-the-mark. . . . Superbly written. . . . A broadly funny book by someone with an unerring satirical sense and the ability to create wonderful characters.” —Newark Sunday Star-Ledger

“The unassuming conversations, the faultless dialogue, the sheer ease with which the story progresses are of course Jane Smiley’s strength, and it is considerable.” —Anita Brookner, The Spectator

“[Smiley] is a gifted realist, able to capture the way things actually work and feel, from a high-level real estate transaction to a pool party circa 1983.” —The New York Sun

“Smiley’s new novel—written with her customary confidence, scale and assurance—may stand as an arresting development in what might one day look like a distinct genre of American turn-of-the-21st-century fiction, searching back to find the most recent wrong turning in the receding past.” —Financial Times

JANE SMILEY is the author of numerous novels, including A Thousand Acres, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and the Last Hundred Years Trilogy: Some Luck, Early Warning, and Golden Age. She is the author as well of several works of nonfiction and books for young adults. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has also received the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature. She lives in Northern California. View titles by Jane Smiley

Chapter 1

THIS WOULD BE '82. I was out at the Viceroy with Bobby Baldwin. Bobby Baldwin was my one employee, which made us not quite friends, but we went out to the Viceroy almost every night. My marriage was finished and his hadn't started, so we spent a lot of time together that most everyone else we knew was spending with their families. I didn't mind. My business card had the Viceroy's number in the corner, under "may also be reached at." Buyers called me there. It was a good sign if they wanted to see a house again in what you might call the middle of the night. That meant they couldn't wait till morning. And if they wanted to see it again in the middle of the night--well, I did my best to show it to them. That was the difference between Bobby and me. He always said, "Their motivation needs to be tested, that's what I think. Let 'em wait a little bit."

Bobby was not my brother, but he might as well have been. Sally, his sister, had been my girlfriend in high school for about a year and a half. She was the first person I ever knew who had a phone of her own. She used to call me up and tell me what to do. "Now, Joey," she would say, "tomorrow wear those tan pants you've got, and the blue socks with the clocks on them, and your white shirt, and that green sweater I gave you, and I am going to wear my blue circle skirt with the matching cashmere sweater, and I'll meet you on the steps. We'll look great. Have you done your algebra problems? When you get to number four, the variable is seven, and x equals half of y. If you remember that, then you won't have a problem with it. Did you wash your face yet? Don't forget to use that stuff I bought you. Rub it in clockwise, just a little tiny dab, about the size of the tip of your pencil eraser. Okay?"

I had been short, and now I was tall. I had been skinny and quiet and religious, and now I was good-looking and muscular. It was Sally Baldwin who brought me along, told me what to wear and do and think and say. She was never wrong; she never lost her patience. She created me, and when she was done we broke up in a formal sense, but she kept calling me. She was smart and went off to Smith College, and I was sure she would get everything organized there once and for all. I went to Penn State. In April of my freshman year, Sally was killed in a car accident outside of Boston. I had talked to her two days before. "Now, Joey," she had said, "it's okay to see a woman who is almost thirty, but you don't say that you are dating her, you say that you are seeing her. Seeing is much more sophisticated than dating, and it doesn't lead to marriage."

I went home for the funeral. It was as if the Baldwins had been eviscerated. All they had left were Felicity, Norton, Leslie, and Bobby. That didn't seem like much without Sally to move them along. Betty, their mom, couldn't act of her own free will. The funeral director, Pat Mahoney, had to seat her here and stand her there and remove her from this spot and place her in that spot. Gordon seemed better, almost vigilant in a way, though my mother said he would never recover and maybe he never did. Bobby was ten then, nine years younger than I was. Gordon came up to me afterward and asked me how I was doing. He was concerned, the way you always get at funerals, and I couldn't help telling him that I wasn't doing at all well--I hated college and was terribly homesick anyway, and now there was this stunning thing that was the end of Sally--and the next thing I knew he was offering me a job and I was taking it, and I went back to pick up my stuff at Penn State two days after the funeral, and I started working for Gordon the following Monday, which I certainly would not have been invited to do if Sally were alive and my girlfriend or fiancee because Gordon didn't like to be bankrolling everyone in the whole family, especially not sons-in-law.

My dad used to wonder what the Baldwins' real name was. They weren't like any Baldwins he had ever known. Gordon was loud and affectionate. Hey, honey, he always said, no matter who he was talking to. He ate out every night. He had three or four restaurants he took everyone to, owned by his poker buddies, I think. He played poker twice a week, high stakes. These games had been going for generations. For a living, he bought and sold things. For a while, it was antiques; for a while, jewelry; for a while, cars; for a while, expensive fixtures out of houses and restaurants and hotels that were being torn down. Once in a while he would hear about some hotel in the city that was going under, and he would come home with a truckload of dishes or silver that carried a hotel monogram. One year, his barn was full of pink silk chairs and settees from the lobby of a hotel in Montreal. Another year he got a thousand commodes. That was the year he persuaded everyone who bought a house from us that "you got to have one more bathroom than the number of bedrooms. It's the wave of the future." Always land and houses and dairy-cattle breeding stock. One thing leads to another; that is, houses lead to commodes, and then commodes lead to houses, which lead to land, which leads to dairy cattle, which lead to cheese, which leads to pizza pies, which lead to manicotti and veal Parmesan, which lead to wine, which leads to love, which leads to babies, houses, and commodes. That was Gordon Baldwin in a nutshell.

My father, who didn't like anything to lead to anything else, because of sin, couldn't decide whether the Baldwins had originally been "Obolenskis" or "Balduccis" or "Baldagyis." He took solace in the fact that we were Stratfords, always had been Stratfords; there was no misspelling of the Stratford name since the Middle Ages. The Baldwins had come to town after the war. That was all anyone knew; and for all that Gordon had gotten rich and locally famous, and he, Bobby, and everyone else in the family talked and talked, where the Baldwins had come from was something they never talked about.

Anyway, I could hardly keep my eyes open, though it was only midnight, early for a Baldwin, and Bobby was wide awake. He was drinking and playing craps for pennies with a builder we knew. The bar was about half full. It was a Wednesday. I said, "See you at ten."

Bobby said, "See that, a five and a three. That's eight."

"Bobby," I said. "Ten! I have to show a house at ten-fifteen and I want to be sure you're there before I go."

"Ten," said Bobby.

"Ten in the morning."

"In the morning."

"Morning is when the sun is in the sky and you don't have to turn on your headlights."

"Got you. Roll 'em." He looked at me and smiled. He looked just like Betty. I shook my head. As I passed next to the table right behind where we had been sitting, I saw a guy look up, look at me. I went out into the parking lot.

The parking lot of the Viceroy backed up on the river, the Nut. My condo was in a development in a smaller town upriver, Nut Hollow. Instead of getting right into my car, I walked down to the river and had a look at the moon, which was shining round and bright. The river was black and glassy around the circle of the moon for just a single long moment; then the wind came up and ruffled the image. I saw there was a woman squatting at the base of a tree, about ten yards from the river. When she turned at my footsteps, I realized it was Fern Minette, Bobby's fiancée. She stood up with a big smile, wiping her hands on her jeans. Fern was about twenty-seven or so. She and Bobby had been engaged for four and a half years. I said, "Well, it's Fern! What are you doing, Fernie?"

"Cat entrapment."

"You're trapping cats?"

"Well, my cat. He got out of the car when I took him to the grocery store Friday." She pointed to a cat carrier with its door open, just barely visible, in a cleft up the bank from the river. "I put things in there. Liver. His toys. Last night he went in, but when I moved away from the tree, he ran out again." She sighed.

I said, "Bobby's in the Viceroy. Maybe he would help you. He's not doing anything productive."

"You can't help with a cat. A cat can't be herded, a cat has to be attracted. I just can't figure out the thing that would do it, and as the nights go by it gets harder. You should go away, anyway."

"Do you stay out here all night?"

"Till two. Then I come back at six. Go away! He might be watching me and making up his mind!"

I got in my car and shut the door. When I turned on my headlights, Fern waved, then hunkered down beside the tree. The strangest thing about Bobby and Fern was that they had actually discussed marriage. Neither one was the sort of person you could image having any life plan that would lead to regular hours, a house, and then children who accepted them as parents.

Bobby was still on my mind when I got up to go to the office in the morning, probably because I was annoyed in advance that he would be late and I would have to rush to my appointment. It was a sharp but clear spring morning, not quite to the daffodil stage. The sky was a cold blue-gray, but the grass had greened up on the hillsides, and it seemed like you could see each blade shining with chlorophyll. It was the sort of day where houses look great, especially brick houses, and I had a brick house to show, one with a big front lawn and a newly blacktopped driveway.

The surprise was that Bobby was at the office, in a jacket and a tie, and he had the Multiple Listing book out of his desk, wide open to the listings in the high one-hundreds. In those days, that was the back of the book and there were some nice houses there, houses up in Rollins Hills with five and six bedrooms and Sub-Zero refrigerators. I remember I showed a house up there with its own little sauna/steam room. The buyers and I stood in our shoes in the bathroom, turning the seven dials and staring into the little wood-paneled cubbyhole like we'd never seen running water before. Anyway, Bobby was deep in the Rollins Hills listings. As soon as I walked in, he said, "Guess what! This guy in the bar last night, he's moving out from the city. I'm taking him out this morning, eleven-thirty. He wants to see seven houses today and seven tomorrow, and then he's going to pick. You should have hung around, but I'm glad you didn't. He was this--"

"Dark-haired guy in a gray jacket?"

"Yeah."

"That's funny. He looked up at me when I was leaving."

"People always look at you when you're leaving the Viceroy. They're looking at you in disbelief."

"They're looking at you in shame, Bob. Anyway, did you see Fern? She was out there trying to catch her cat."

"She's never going to catch that cat. That cat has been trying to escape for five years. You know, when she moved into her apartment, that cat had the vermin cleaned out in a month. Here he is."

A Cadillac pulled into our little lot and eased between my Lincoln and Bobby's new BMW. Baldwin Development bought a fleet of cars every two years, always whatever some crony of Gordon's was just getting into. After the New Year, Rollins Hills Motors had gotten the BMW franchise, and Stu Grade had sold Gordon six BMWs over a poker game. Bobby's was red. The local sheriff had been informed that Bobby's was the red one.

The guy who got out of the Caddy was very smooth looking--creased tan slacks, expensive-looking white shirt, Italian-cut jacket, tasseled loafers. He pocketed his keys and threw his sunglasses down on the seat of his car, then glanced around for our door. When he saw me looking at him through the plate glass, he broke into a smile. There was no one with him. House deals without women put you out into unknown territory sometimes. That was especially true in those days, when most buyers were families moving around the county, to nicer houses, or out to the country from the city. But Bobby needed something to do with his time, and I thought an iffy client was better than any one of his usual six activities--sleeping late, going to the Viceroy, going to the doctor, going to the dentist, doing repairs around his own place, or calling Gordon and asking for something to do. It was this last that had resulted in Bobby's employment at my office. Bobby was well-meaning, and even smart, but he was a danger to himself and others simply because he couldn't use any sort of tool or even do anything outside of his normal routine without hurting himself or getting sick. If it wasn't a broken toe from stumbling over a stack of weights at the gym, then it was poison ivy all over his face from taking Fern on a hike, or some sort of food poisoning. Gordon said to me, "That kid could put his eye out with a hammer or break his leg with a screwdriver. Real estate is the safest place for him." And it was. But I didn't think he would be any match for this Marcus Burns, to whom he was now introducing me.

My clients were, or would soon be, waiting. My clients were careful buyers, the Sloans. I made a living in real estate by keeping track of what a buyer wanted and doing research--going to every open house, calling other agents, visiting model homes, just in general mastering as many features of as many listings as I could--but you couldn't get ahead of the Sloans. What they wanted to know about every house they looked at, even the ones they didn't like, defied preparation. They had been looking for four months, not an inordinately long time, but they had seen every house on the market in their price range and now they just waited for new listings. Usually, at some point you gave up on people like that, because you knew they would never buy. The one thing that made me think the Sloans would eventually go for something was their conviction that something valuable or even precious was out there. The more I assured them we were on top of every available property, the more worried they got that we were missing one. I thought the tension would eventually become too much for them to bear. Needless to say, they were prequalified in every way. The mortgagor was dying to lend them money.