SOURCE: “Kitchen-Table Tales of Desire and Will,” in Christian Science Monitor, Vol. 81, No. 234, October 30, 1989, p. 13.

In the following review, MacLachlan lauds Smiley's conversational style in the novellas of Ordinary Love and Good Will.

Jane Smiley's two novellas, Ordinary Love and Good Will, are about loss and acceptance. Though the characters and settings seem, on the surface, vastly different, each story highlights the destructive nature of desire and will, specifically to control situations and people. In the end, Smiley's characters learn a potentially shattering lesson: that it is impossible to control another person's life and almost as difficult to willfully control one's own.

In Ordinary Love, a middle-aged mother describes coming to terms with her life as a single woman with five grown children, who were taken from her by an enraged husband 20 years earlier. His rage stemmed from an affair she had with a neighbor in an attempt...