![]() ![]() Or maybe it is not a thing at all, nothing, something not present." This quest to understand marriage is continued in "Ordinary Love" by Rachel Kinsella, a woman in her early fifties who feels compelled finally to reveal to her grown children how her marriage broke up 20 years earlier, and why she temporarily lost custody of them. After this crisis, the husband speculates "that marriage is a small container, after all, barely large enough to hold some children, two inner lives, two lifelong meditations of whatever complexity, burst out of it and out of it, cracking, deforming. ![]() "The Age of Grief" was remarkable for its ability to delineate both the fragility and strength of marital love in the voice of a man in his mid-thirties whose wife is having an affair she hasn't admitted to. The two novellas in Ordinary Love & Good Will are even stronger than the highly praised "Age of Grief," establishing her as a master of the form. In contrast to The Greenlanders's dense historical narrative, Smiley's stories lucidly explore the complexities of contemporary sexual and domestic life. But Smiley's reputation as one of the finest younger American fiction writers is based primarily upon The Age of Grief, a collection of five stories and the title novella. $17.95 JANE SMILEY has written four novels, most recently the haunting 14th-century epic saga, The Greenlanders. ORDINARY LOVE & GOOD WILL By Jane Smiley Knopf. ![]()
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