ORDINARY LOVE AND GOOD WILL

In these handsomely crafted novellas, as in The Age of Grief (1987) and other works, Smiley (The Greenlanders, 1988) sets within the fussy patterns of familial interaction the inexplicable—sudden, volcanic surfacings of rage or desire that transform a seemingly secure life into a new landscape of compromise and sad wisdom. In "Ordinary Love," 52-year-old Rachel, divorced mother of five, grandmother of four, awaits with son Joe the arrival from India of Joe's twin Michael. "An ancient wave of terror," notes Rachel, "seems to unroll from my head downward. . .reunions are fraught with echoes." Twenty years before, Rachel had announced to heartily dominating husband Patrick that she was having an affair with Ed, a novelist and world traveller. In a day or so, Patrick had taken the children away to England, and Rachel's life in the old house with happy children had gone up in smoke. Over the years, children will come home, leave again. Now during this reunion, one of Rachel's children will exhume old griefs—a shocker, matching Rachel's delayed truthtelling about her affair long ago. Her grown-up children, bright, good—and wary—were the recipients, Rachel realizes, of "two of the cruelest gifts. . .the experience of perfect family happiness and the certain knowledge that it could not last." In "Good Will," a 20th-century paradise in Pennsylvania—self-sufficiency on the lushly producing acres of a creatively designed farm with pioneer skills of cloth- and furniture-making—contains a family of three. Yet within the self-assertion of a lively, intelligent, adored young boy lies the serpent of destruction. At the close, paradise lost, his father will accept "fragments" instead of ecosystems of being; good and evil; grief and present new directions; and a time to direct—and a time to step aside from—the inexorable growth of a child. The quiet, even, but never thin narrative voices here pace out the discovery of elusive sad truths—truths that settle in and clarify in the wake of past betrayals by the jagged furies of the ego. Smiley's best to date.