![]() ![]() Together, the novellas raise a multitude of questions – about being a parent and being a child about the desire to control other people and the need to compromise. In his singlemindedness, he does not see the damage he is causing until it is too late: his domestic idyll explodes in a frenzy of discontent. ![]() Good Will, by contrast, is the story of a father, a relentlessly self-sufficient man determined to live apart from a coarsely materialistic world. In forfeiting her powerful husband she fears that she has done her children – insecure Joe restless Michael cynical Ellen – irrevocable harm. In Ordinary Love, Smiley focuses on a womans infidelity and the lasting, indelible effects it leaves on her children long after her departure. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acresand one of her generation’s most eloquent chroniclers of ordinary familial love (The New York Times)comes two exquisite twin novellas that chronicle the difficult choices that reshape the lives of two very different families. Ordinary Love gives voice to a mother, loving but unsure of her love’s value. ‘I have given my children the two cruellest gifts I had to give… the experience of perfect family happiness and the certain knowledge that it could not last.’ So says the narrator of Ordinary Love, the first of two thematically linked novellas, each investigating the dream of the perfect family. The Greenlanders, Ordinary Love and Good Will, A Thousand Acres. From the author of the Pulitzer-winning A Thousand Acres, two novellas which showcase Jane Smiley’s unique gift for capturing the nuances of American domestic life. JANE SMILEY: LOCATION AND A GEOGRAPHER OF LOVE In her essay on place, Eudora Welty. ![]()
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