Rachel recognizes that "there is only one motivation and that is desire." But the power of desire in "Ordinary Love" extends beyond mere sexual passion to also encompass Rachel's love for her children and theirs for her.
If Rachel's so recent stability is shattered by Pat's actions, her narrative records the numbingly slow process by which she is finally, in piecemeal fashion, reunited with her children while registering, as well, the development of her own understanding of human nature. It is a sexual relationship, and a friendship, too." Pat, a pediatric researcher and a firm believer in order, reacts with unexpected brutality, striking his wife to the floor and abruptly disappearing with their five young children, subsequently winning primary custody of them. If the tension in "The Age of Grief" arose out of a wife's unwillingness directly to confront her infidelity, the grief that "Ordinary Love" powerfully illuminates results from Rachel's painfully miscalculated honesty to her husband: "Pat, I have been having a relationship with Ed Stackhouse, down the road, and I am not going to stop. 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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