Ordinary Love” and “Good Will (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Jane Smiley
- First Published: 1989
- Type of Work: Novellas
- Genres: Long fiction, Psychological fiction, Short fiction, Domestic realism
- Subjects: Family or family life, Self-discovery, Mothers, Parents and children, Racism, Love or romance, Alienation, Guilt, Midwest, Farms, farmers, or farming, Adultery, Divorce, Small-town life, Loneliness, Accountants or accounting, Arson
- Locales: Pennsylvania, Midwest (U.S.)
By placing a mother's story alongside a father's story in this volume, Smiley experiments with the differing narrative rhythms she associates with each gender. The first-person voice of Ordinary Love belongs to a fifty-two-year-old Iowan, a divorced mother of five grown children who typifies Smiley's clear-eyed defiance of sentimental pieties about the heartland matriarch. Rachel Kinsella's story, matter-of-factly told in a tone at once stoic and unrepentant, involves the jarring incompatibility of having proudly borne five babies in five years while married to a doting,...
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