ordinary love and good will by jane smiley

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.īoth 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. 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. “…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.”

In 2001, Smiley was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Forster's seminal Aspects of the Novel, that roams from eleventh century Japan's Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji to twenty-first century Americans chick lit. Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), is a non-fiction meditation on the history and the nature of the novel, somewhat in the tradition of E. Her novella The Age of Grief was made into the 2002 film The Secret Lives of Dentists. In 1995 she wrote her sole television script produced, for an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street.

It was adapted into a film of the same title in 1997. Her best-selling A Thousand Acres, a story based on William Shakespeare's King Lear, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. Henry Award for her short story 'Lily', which was published in The Atlantic Monthly. Smiley published her first novel, Barn Blind, in 1980, and won a 1985 O. From 1981 to 1996, she taught at Iowa State University. While working towards her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar. Louis, and graduated from John Burroughs School. Jane Smiley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist.īorn in Los Angeles, California, Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St.

Ordinary love and good will by jane smiley