"Ordinary Love" and "Good Will" by Jane Smiley

First published: 1989

Type of work: Novellas

Form and Content

In “Ordinary Love” and “Good Will”, the reader is presented with protagonists whose lives, and the lives of those closest to them, have been irrevocably altered by a chain of events that they set in motion years before. The novellas capture these characters at the point in time when the consequences of their previous actions are made clear to them in ways heretofore unrealized. Under the apparent calm of the familiar domestic routines described in each story runs an undercurrent of betrayal, neglect, and violence. The reader’s shock at these events parallels the protagonists’ sudden awareness of their culpability in generating the destructive forces that ravaged their family life.

Ordinary Love opens with Rachel Kinsella and son Joe preparing for the return of Michael, Joe’s twin. To curb their anxieties, Rachel and Joe busy themselves with the mundane tasks of cleaning the house and fixing the lawnmower. Rachel’s love of domestic life can be seen in the careful and loving way in which she polishes her house; her love for her children can be seen in her memories of their childhood. One is also introduced to Ellen, Rachel’s oldest child, coming to know her not only from her own words and actions but also from her mother’s reminiscences of her as a child. In fact, readers learn most of what they know about the Kinsella family from Rachel’s reflections on the twenty years since her divorce from the children’s father, Pat.

Almost casually, Rachel reveals that the cause of her divorce was an affair that she had to escape from the oppressive control her husband exerted over her life. When Rachel confesses her infidelity, Pat’s anger conceives the perfect revenge—he severs her relationship with the children by sending them to England, isolating her from them for the next ten years.

This is a family that has survived the pain of separation. The individuals in it have developed idiosyncratic coping mechanisms—Ellen’s casual disregard for her mother’s privacy and her continuous watchfulness over family members, including her two young daughters and her husband, are the likely result of her mother’s sudden and unexplained disappearance years ago. Joe depends on his brother’s sameness to provide security and self-definition. Michael, seemingly aware of the irony of his actions, escapes from the oppressiveness of his brother’s attentions by leaving, a mirror of his mother’s exodus for self-preservation. At the end, Rachel realizes that she has given to her children the two cruelest gifts she had to give: the experience of perfect family happiness and the certain knowledge that it could not last.

Good Will presents the male version of the self-centered, driven protagonist—Robert Miller. A veteran of the Vietnam War, Bob has created an island of self-sufficiency in rural Pennsylvania for himself, his wife, Liz, and their son, Tommy. Like Rachel Kinsella, Bob learns that his view of reality is limited to his own experience; he must fact the fact that he has realized his desires and exerted his will at the expense of those closest to him. Bob has taken self-sufficiency to its logical conclusion—his family raises or makes everything they eat and use. What they cannot make themselves, they gain through barter. They have no car, no phone, and no television. Bob plans to pull Tommy out of school at the end of this year and teach him at home.

As the story progresses, readers are treated to detailed descriptions of the beauty of life close to nature and the patterns of life for a family subsisting on their own efforts. They also see that nature can be cruel and uncontrollable—Tommy’s foal drowns in a freak fall through the ice, for example. One also notices hints of restlessness in Liz’s walks to church and potential conflict in Tommy’s problems at school. All of these incidents, however, are explained and effectively suppressed by Bob’s force of character and his belief in the goodness of the world that he has created and of the members of his family.

Only when Lydia Harris, an African American professor new to the university, and her daughter, Annie, arrive on the scene does the story intensify to its climax. The agent of destruction in this case is eight-year-old Tommy, who progresses from exhibiting racist behavior toward Annie at school to cutting her coat to ribbons to setting Lydia and Annie’s house on fire in a fit of envy. This final act results in the family coming under control of the social welfare system and being forced to give up their nonconformist lifestyle. At the end of the story, Liz and Tommy appear to have adjusted well to their new surroundings in town and are functioning well, but Bob is undergoing intensive therapy for depression and an inability to adapt, his pride and confidence crushed by the realization that he had ignored the needs of those he professed to love most.

Context

The singular and defining characteristic of Jane Smiley’s style is attention to detail, a trait that is more than simply a testament to her craftsmanship; it is a direct outgrowth of the views that she holds about the relationship between women and literature.

For Smiley, the network of relationships within the family provides fertile territory to map new ways of portraying women and of developing narrative techniques. She extols mothers’ natural talents for observation; her own prose in an example of the deliberate honing and channeling of this talent into art. The leanness of her style attests the care that she takes in weighing each word and phrase to determine its worthiness to convey the meaning that she intends—the same care a mother would demonstrate in tending to a child, the same deliberate strokes a woman would use in polishing pegged-maple floors. For Smiley, the routines familiar to women in their everyday lives can be the foundation of a new literature written by and for them. She enthusiastically anticipates other women writers following her lead in transforming the patterns of their lives into new forms of literary expression.

Central to her vision of the future for women’s literature is the belief that women must be treated in literature as autonomous adults, free of the stereotypes created for them by others’ needs. In Smiley’s opinion, the excitement of the future lies in women writing women’s stories in forms unique to women.

Throughout her works, one finds women who are seeking to discover the limits of their intellect, women whose journeys take them beyond the borders of convention. It is Smiley’s unique contribution to women’s literature that she has pinpointed this juncture and identified the paths to be forged in the future. Her belief, reiterated as variations on the same theme in many of her works, that humans are driven by the fundamental urges of desire and will are reassuring. Even though the consequences of the free exercise of those urges can be painful, they can also lead to new depths of understanding.

Bibliography

Brandmark, Wendy. “Abnormal Conformists.” The Times Literary Supplement, April 27, 1990, 456. Argues that these two novellas portray individuals who choose not to conform to society’s expectations.

Humphreys, Josephine. “Perfect Family Self-Destructs.” The New York Times Book Review, November 5, 1989, 1. Compares these novellas to troubled dreams—sharp in focus and short in duration. Appreciates Smiley’s controlled use of language and her ability to maintain a sympathetic attitude for characters who create their own destruction.

MacLachlan, Suzanne. “Kitchen Table Tales of Desire and Will.” The Christian Science Monitor, October 30, 1989, 13. Sees these stories as “tales that highlight the destructive nature of desire and will.” Concludes that one’s life and those of the people one loves are ultimately controllable.

Rubin, Merle. “Storytelling, The Second Oldest Profession.” The Wall Street Journal, November 29, 1989, p. A12. Finds these novellas worthy and workmanlike in execution but lacking in excitement. Attributes each protagonist’s downfall to pride.

Smiley, Jane. “Can Mothers Think?” In The True Subject: Writers on Life and Craft, edited by Kurt Brown. St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1993. A lecture delivered at an Aspen writers’ conference. Smiley explores the significance of being a woman writer.