Jane Smiley: Good Faith

Reviewed by LINDA HERRICK

Meet Joe Stratford, a 40-year-old real-estate dealer in a small town on America's east coast in 1982. Joe's an average Joe, decent, hard-working, cares about his clients, relieved to be divorced, no kids. His motto: a place for everything and everything in its place.

So, as we first meet him in his two-man realtor office - his business card with the number of the bar where he "may also be reached at" - the initial instinct is that Joe's a bland kind of guy and there may not be much fun ahead in the next 416 pages of the latest by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jane Smiley.

Well, as Joe himself is thinking a few pages ahead as he unexpectedly embarks on an ecstatic encounter with his business partner's (married) daughter, "How amazing was that? What an oversight!"

There will be many oversights and insights to come. Not only does Joe fall deeply in love with the aforementioned and quite eccentric Felicity, engaging in a highly erotic series of secret trysts, he also becomes seduced in another way. Joe falls in love with money.

It's a tricky courtship, at first. A new smoothie in town, former IRS investigator Marcus Burns, is intent on getting Joe and his friends embroiled in a huge property investment scheme which may make them barrows of money, or ruin them. Then again, Marcus may just be a glib fantasist.

Joe doesn't know for sure, and plays hard to get, for a while at least. Resistance is useless. Marcus - a character even Wall St's Gordon Gecko would be dazzled by - does not understand "no" and he is a master at building a vision. Or an illusion.

The times are just perfect. Where the good folks of the town have built their lives around the principle of "if you can't afford it, you can't have it", this is the new age of Reaganism, and the aftermath of the high-interest Carter years.

It's an infection, this easy access to easy money, which eats away at moral judgment, the concept of ethics or, indeed, good faith, when a man's word is a measure of his worth.

Will Joe make the money he's come to covet relatively late in life? Will he find true love? Good Faith is a funny, fascinating adventure which ends not quite as you'd expect.

Smiley, who won the Pulitzer for A Thousand Acres, is in crisply witty form, creating people you can absolutely believe in as the insidious decay of greed creeps into town. It seems a deadly accurate depiction of the ethos of the Reagan era - and when you think back, not too far removed from what occurred here in the early 80s, when words like "Chase" started to feel wrong.

Certainly the fastest page-turner I've encountered all year; I was sorry to say goodbye to Joe and co at the end. How amazing is that?

Faber & Faber, $34.95

* Linda Herrick is the NZ Herald arts editor.