Good faith amid bad judgments

Though Jane Smiley’s bestselling new novel is set in the Reagan era, it couldn’t be more timely, with its tale of boomtime temptation and the suckering of Middle Americans. Its title is punchy. Its characters are tenderly written. Its sex scenes are hotter than you’d expect from a 53-year-old former Iowa English professor.

Still, it almost hurts to read “Good Faith” (Knopf) here in Northern California, where Smiley lives now and where the wounds are still fresh from the last bout of free-market mania and depression. As it turns out, this wasn’t the terrain she’d intended for her 12th novel.

“I was going to write a book about sex and Hollywood,” the author said, curling up on a couch in her Monterey County ranch house. “But when I was on the book tour for ‘Horse Heaven,’ every hotel I would check into, there would be a local magazine that said, ‘Sex in Cincinnati!’ Or ‘Sex in Wichita!’ And I thought, ‘You know, I’m really behind the tip of the wave on this sex thing.’ ”

Which, she says, is how she ended up with the queasier, closer-to-home hook -- irrational exuberance.

Jane Smiley has been compared to Balzac and lauded as perhaps the closest thing her generation has produced to a specialist in big-picture social novels. Her work has spanned every genre, from “Moo,” a comedy starring a pig on a college campus, to “A Thousand Acres,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for its Midwestern retelling of the tragic “King Lear.”

She has written a dense Norse epic (“The Greenlanders”), domestic novellas (“The Age of Grief”) and magical realism (“Horse Heaven,” in which several of the most memorable characters are equine). She has received kudos for her recent biography of Charles Dickens. She has been deluged with hate mail for an essay in Harper’s dissing Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

Then there are the magazine and newspaper pieces, on everything from her horse habit (she has 12) to her political viewpoints. Her proud first-person account of her family life -- three marriages, three children and three breakups over three decades -- generated days’ worth of letters to the editor after the New York Times ran it under the headline, “There They Go, Bad-Mouthing Divorce Again.”

But in person, at least on this midweek morning, she’s first and foremost a woman making the best of a bad cold. “Would you like some tea?” Smiley asks, padding into her kitchen and apologizing for a remodeling that has been in progress now for three years.

Her blouse is baggy, her face delicate behind her wire-rimmed glasses. She is 6-feet-2, but she looks frail today, and her lips are pale with the bug she says her middle child brought home. Dogs barge in and out -- two little Jack Russell terriers and a Great Dane. Men in work boots wander around -- her boyfriend, Jack Canning, who is remodeling her house, and her third ex-husband, Steve Mortensen, who is building her a new deck.

Mortensen calls hello from his truck and points out the best spot for parking. Later, Canning pops in.

“Honey? Jack?” she calls as he walks past. “Come here a minute, dear. The interviewer would like you to stand up and turn around and show her who you are and what you look like.”

Laughing, the gray-haired builder, a Philadelphia transplant, jams his hands into his back pockets and pirouettes for her.

“Doesn’t he look good?” she asks. “He’s notorious in L.A. for being that strange, good-looking guy Jane Smiley is always with.”

Replies Canning: “Good thing I shaved.”

Both he and Mortensen reside nearby; Smiley lives alone with her children, who are gone at the moment. The older two daughters, by her second marriage, are in college, and it’s a school day for her and Mortensen’s 10-year-old son. Her 20-year-old is at UC Santa Cruz, and her 24-year-old is at the University of Iowa law school, where her instructors, Smiley said, include Smiley’s first husband.

“Yeah, we’re very California,” the author says, sounding simultaneously self-deprecating and boastful and, despite seven years here, utterly un-Californian. But it has been a long way from the prairie to this posh horse country where, in the 1960s, Bob Dylan used to visit Joan Baez. Though Smiley was born in Los Angeles, she was an infant when her family moved to St. Louis. Her parents divorced when she was a small child. Her mother, a journalist, raised her with the help of an extended family of chronic storytellers, she has said. “The first novel I ever knew was our family,” she wrote in a 1996 essay.

Then came stardom

She was still an undergraduate at Vassar in 1970 when she married for the first time and moved to Iowa for her husband’s schooling. The marriage lasted five years; her second marriage lasted eight years; her stint in Iowa stretched for two decades. Then came “A Thousand Acres” and literary stardom, and book contracts that made it clear she would no longer have to teach.

With her oldest child ready for college, she and Mortensen packed up the younger two and headed to California, where he had lived some years before. “The house I had when we first came was 3 acres,” she says. “Big, voluminous house. Swimming pool. Riding arena. Barn.”

She had vetoed Los Angeles (“too big, and I’m a country person”), and he had vetoed the far northern and far southern ends of California, which led them to this valley of old-money ranchland inland from Carmel. They then promptly “made all the mistakes people make when they move to California,” she said. “You know, you look at the amount of money you have back in the other United States, and you say, ‘I deserve blahblahblah because I have this amount of money,’ but then there’s this weight of maintaining it and paying for it.”

When her third marriage failed in 1997, that weight became oppressive. She sold the fancy house and bought a 2,700-square-foot fixer-upper on an acre of live oaks that, comparatively speaking, was “cheap.” With some of the money she had left over, she said, she invested in tech stocks. Since then, the house has burgeoned -- it has been remodeled, so far, to 4,000 square feet and six bedrooms -- and the tech stocks have evaporated. By the time she sold them, she said, they had lost 70% of their value.

“I had a feeling like I’d been suckered, though I don’t know by whom. Maybe myself,” she said of the tech investments. “What was I thinking? Why did I think I could put money in at the top of the market like that?”

Those are the questions at the core of “Good Faith,” which deals with the emotional landscape of both home buying and bad investment, following Joe Stratford, a fortysomething divorced real estate agent in a Pennsylvania township in 1983. Stratford is a sweet, shallow guy with a nice condo, a decent business, a satisfactorily swingin’ sex life and the trust of his neighbors. Then, one day, in blows a smartly dressed stranger -- an ex-IRS agent with big talk about luxury developments and new tax laws and how deregulation has changed everything. And sure enough, everything in Stratford’s world does change.

Smiley said the book was actually inspired by a true story a friend had told her from the time of the savings and loan debacle. Also, having written the open-ended “Horse Heaven,” she said, she wanted to work on a novel with a more structured plot.

But those were only two motivations among many.

Completing an ‘80s trilogy

“I had always wanted to write a trilogy about the 1980s,” she said. “ ‘A Thousand Acres’ takes place in ‘81, and ‘Moo’ takes place in ’89. I thought this might be that third book that would fit into the middle slot. And I think every baby boomer is interested in real estate.”

More broadly, however, Smiley says she wanted to explore the current climate of Enron-style scandal and political-corporate back scratching that she traces to the free-market drumbeat of the Reagan years.

“I hated the ‘80s,” she said. “Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a book about the ‘80s called ‘The Worst Years of Our Lives,’ and she wasn’t kidding. I was in Iowa in the ‘80s, and it really was hardship -- all the farms were falling down the tubes, the state didn’t really know how to deal with it, there was the banking crisis, people were very unhappy, farmers were committing suicide.

“But there was this constant din of stuff from Washington and California about how we’re all going to be rich now. And it was evident, if you lived in the Midwest, that we weren’t all going to be rich. Some of those other people were going to be rich, but we all were going to be forgotten.”

Charming and fast-paced as it is, “Good Faith,” she says, was written “out of rage.”

As she says it, that word -- “rage” -- sounds more matter of fact than angry. Smiley has long been public about her politics. She is an inveterate writer of letters to the editor and often e-mails like-minded newspaper columnists with viewpoints and arguments she believes should be better explored for their readers.

“I used to write to the Des Moines Register, but they print your address and I’d get these irate religious tracts in the mail,” she said.

Since the 2000 elections, she has peppered the New York Times with letters about the Bush administration. “The right wing is systematically destroying the political infrastructure and all sense of community in this country in the name of profits and power,” she wrote in a typical missive last year, calling the rise of the Republican conservatives a “coup d’etat.”

Asked what sort of novel she would write about these times, however, she reserved judgment -- sort of. “We don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know if we’ve hit bottom yet.”

In the meantime she is working on two books of nonfiction, she said, one a history of the novel, the other a memoir of her experience as an owner of thoroughbreds.

“Maybe by the time I’m finished, we’ll have a sense of whether this era will come to an end,” she said. And if not?

“Maybe I’ll write about sex and Hollywood.”