Customer Reviews

Ordinary Love and Good Will: Two Novellas

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4 star:		(4)
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Ordinary Love is a decent enough novella, but Good Will is just superb. I've never read anything quite like it. The characters are lovingly crafted, and their unusual setting and lifestyle gives Smiley to fully showcase her descriptive powers.

The most surprising thing is how well she writes from the main character's perspective. His personality as a father and husband is so clearly defined, so original, and so _masculine_ that I often found it difficult to believe that the author is a woman.

Like Smiley's other writings, this story is very much about relationships--familial, neighborly and those between oneself and the world--and how even the most carefully made decisions and choices can dramatically alter an equally well-planned life.

This novella originally appealed to me as a story of escape from society and retreat to nature, but I took away a great many lessons about life as well. Within her beautifully woven tale Smiley manages substantive discussions on racism, money, religion, and sexism--but these scenes are unforced. They are simply _there_, as natural as the lifestyle treasured by the main protagonists.

I loved this book.

I loved these novellas and think they are some of the best works I have read in years. The first time through I was riveted and struck by Good Will but did not like Ordinary Love as much. I reread them and saw the brillinace of Ordinary Love, too. These are so beautifully written and captivating with profound insights into human nature and what it's like to be a parent and how we can hurt each other and our children without meaning to and so much more. This is the best kind of reading there is with lovely use of language and compelling stories that move, surprise, and shake you, making you see life a little differently. I can't say I've read anything better.

An interesting conjoining of two very different stories. I read them in order, starting with "Ordinary Love" and then moving on to "Good Will." At the end, I found myself wondering what links the two stories?

In both, there is a father who directs his family to such an extent that he could be called controlling or even an egomaniac. In "Ordinary Love" the father is not present; he is the "fifth man", invisible, but the scars left by his words and actions have sunk deep. In "Good Will", the father is the protagonist, and through his own eyes we see the results of his actions.

Unlike the other reviewers here, I preferred "Ordinary Love." I enjoyed the character of the mother, who narrates the story. She strives to be objective and offer a balanced viewpoint. She has a depth of self-knowledge. Also, she watches her children with great love, and that lends the story real warmth, which I thought was missing from "Good Will."

I plan to read both stories again. There's a depth of character and thought here that can't be fully taken in with one reading.

Smiley gives us an intimate view into two very different families and the ways in which their different parenting styles affected their children's lives irrevocably. Smiley is a master of character development. When each story begins, you have a certain view of the protagonist and other characters. As the stories unfold, your feelings about each character change. This is a book to be read more than once.

Good Will is by far one of the best novels I've ever read. Ordinary Love was good too. There is nothing ordinary about Jane Smiley's characterizations in Good Will. Those characters could not have been more real if they were real people in the room with me. The psychological, emotional, and moral complexities and motivations they display, the remarkable way in which it was all written and put together..2 years after reading this book, I'm still in awe of it.

This book, as you could probably tell, is made up of two stories: Ordinary Love and Good Will, just as the title says. Although they're entirely different stories they have similar themes as well as aspects that contrast and compliment one another. That makes this "package deal" necessary to allow the author to communicate what she envisioned.

Both stories are similar in that the protagonists are content with the simple things in life. This seems to be an attempt to evoke an appreciation of the everyday things we take for granted.

Both stories also share a strong emphasis on family values. Throughout both stories the results that their family values render allows the reader to contrast the lives of the characters with that of their own. This is also a source of how the stories differ.

Ordinary Love has a protagonist that is very laid back and allows her children to become whatever they aspire to be. This often makes her seem uncaring. Ordinary Love shows the family dynamics of such values.

Good Will focuses more on the other extreme of family values. The father imposes his ways of a simple life free of money. Though he has good intent, in a modern world it's understandably met with resistance. This story tells of a family that lives such a lifestyle and the results.

Both stories are a sort of commentary on the two extremes of family values: complacence and imposition. The author's intent seemed to be to provoke readers to choose a set of family values somewhere between those extremes.

Overall both stories were quite good. I had a preference for Good Will but without Ordinary Love much of the message would be lost. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who found what I outlined above intriguing.

Wonderful writing. Well-crafted characters. Jane Smiley is a master at depicting family relationships. And I love the way her stories sneak up on us. From page to page the lives of her characters unfold in a beautifully detailed, but seemingly aimless way, and then POW! at the end we are hit with the consequences of their "ordinary" behaviors. The cumulative effect is stunning. You won't easily forget these people. Highly recommended.

Jane Smiley has fun drawing families with terribly bright, glib conversations but whose deep currents contain painful experiences. This book has two novellas.

In Ordinary Love, a splintered mid-Western family is drawn together by the return of a beloved brother from two years teaching in India. Gradually the adult children reveal the horrors of their brilliant father's neglect after he high-handedly stole them out of the country; this after being foolishly informed by their mother of her infidelity. Life goes on.

Good Will might have been entitled Self Will - - a stunning picture of a control freak no doubt suffering from one of those behavioral syndromes that "experts" today would diagnose and label to excuse anti-social behavior. Unfortunately this also crops up in the young son. Smiley cleverly creates a no-win situation in which the unlikable, arrogant young daughter of a newly-arrived black academic couple becomes the target of apparent racial prejudice that crops up without familial roots ... skillful and understated writing.

These novellas are written with soft, rich language that evoke strong feelings and raise deep questions.

One novella is about a Vietnam Vet who lives a 'back to the land' existence. He is completely happy with his farming, bartering lifestyle, and his family. Things are too good to remain that utopian forever.

The second novella is about a family where the mother, Rachel, leaves her husband of 20 years because of an affair she has with a neighbor. It deals with desire and how our lives are shaped by it.

The theme of both novellas seems to be summed up in this quote from 'Ordinary Love'.

"...I think that I, too, have done the thing I least wanted to do, that I have given my children the
2 cruelest gifts I had to give, which are these, the experience of perfect family happiness and
the certain knowledge that it could not last." (p.92)

Jane Smile is a prolific author and her novel, Thousand Acres remains one of my all-time favorite books. Her books are very readable and have great depth.

The first novella in this book was good, and the second was really exceptional: interesting, insightful and vivid. I'm now reading 'A Thousand Acres' by the same author and enjoying it as well.