This Week's Reads

Sleepwalker
Jane Smiley is such a breezy natural, a born storyteller, that she could probably write a readable novel in her sleep. Good Faith (Knopf, $26) could be that novel. Its sense of place is palpable, if unstated: somewhere two hours from Manhattan, a backwater abruptly inundated by the speculative real-estate tsunami of the early 1980s. Smiley convincingly sketches the cozy world of real-estate agent Joe Stratford, a small-town schmoe everybody knows because in a small town, everyone knows everyone. We get a feel for the web of friends and family: Joe's high-school sweetheart, who died young, leaving him in a permanent state of surrogate son-in-lawness to her lovely family; his bossily entrepreneurial ex-wife, now cashing in on the nouvelle-cuisine craze; his business partners, each with a cherishable quirk.

Just past 40, living in a spare condo, bellying up to a favorite bar and the odd sexual conquest, Joe is a bit like a Richard Ford or Ann Beattie hero, only well- adjusted. Smiley broke hearts with 1987's The Age of Grief, but evidently there's not enough grief left over for Joe: He's pretty darn content. He drifts into an affair with Felicity, the hopelessly married sister of his youthful sweetheart, and into a partnership with a newcomer from New York, Marcus Burns, an ex-IRS agent with a quicksilver tongue and dreams the size of the Great Tulip Bubble.

A Pulitzer Prize-winner for A Thousand Acres (1991), Smiley gives an offhand authenticity to all the everyday details of Joe's screwings by Felicity, Burns, and others. She's done her homework on '80s realty scams, and the efficiently described bedroom scenes read like an attempt to rewrite Endless Love with the dial turned down from Hot Youth to Simmering Middle Age. But Marcus is too transparent a scammer, babbling, "It's like everything in the world all of a sudden turned into money." Joe's comeuppance is telegraphed and unsuspenseful. Felicity is faceless, and their acrobatic couplings oddly emotion-free.

It's all too drifty, the plot wandering and monotonous. For all the aced details, Faith lacks the real world's drama and the mania that fuels a bubble. The narrative locomotes smoothly but distractedly. It sleepwalks to a foregone conclusion. TIM APPELO

Jane Smiley will read at Third Place Books (17171 Bothell Way N.E., 206-366-3333), 7 p.m. Wed., June 4.

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Funnyman
Sherman Alexie's new collection of two superb stories (plus seven clinkers) shows what makes him one of Seattle's most appealing writers and also one of our most appalling. In Ten Little Indians (Grove, $24), his subversive bent, anarchic wit, and sympathy for social castoffs casting about for a sense of belonging put him squarely in the center of our dominant pop-cultural tradition, classically defined by The New York Times' Tim Egan as Northwest Noir. Sure, he's a tribal writerand his tribe includes Gus Van Sant, Raymond Carver, Tom Robbins, and David Lynch. Like lots of Northwest Noir auteurs, he's better at attaining privileged moments than at sustaining a shapely story. And in a Northwest tribe dominated by pranksters, he may be the giggliest: As Bill Clinton told him after Alexie razzed him mercilessly on national television, "Sherman, you're fucking funny!"

Much of this book is devoted to often-funny repartee; the jibes fly as fast and light as the ball in a Ping-Pong death match. His jokes are serious business. "The two funniest tribes I've ever been around are Indians and Jews," observes one character, "so I guess that says something about the inherent humor of genocide." And yet a joke can be a cheap gimmick that lets the author off too easy. In a weak story about a woman rescued from a Lakeside grad's terror bombing, the rescuer's wife demands, "All right, Mr. Funny! Let's see how long you can go without telling a joke!" He waits seven seconds and says, "About seven seconds."

One must admire Alexie's countless bada-bing! moments and deplore themthey often pop the illusion of real life. At his best, in the time-capsule keeper stories "The Search Engine," about a WSU escapee from the Spokane Reservation who finds a forgotten Indian poet in Seattle, and "What You Pawn I Will Redeem," about a homeless Salish alkie questing for cash to get his grandma's regalia from a Pike Place pawn shop, the jokes know their place: to support the fiction, not score a point in a stand-up competition. At times, his comic gift turns his characters into hand puppets. Alexie is almost always fucking funny, but he's fucking great when his characters escape the confines of his comic-monologue shtick and run free. T.A.

Sherman Alexie will read at Town Hall (1119 Eighth Ave., 206-624-6600; tickets $5), 7:30 p.m. Fri., June 6.

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Mapping The Family Genome
DNA is simple. Family is complicated. In his first novel, Long for This World (Houghton Mifflin, $24), Seattle native Michael Byers' strongest accomplishment is showing how the four members of Seattle's Moss family fit togetherlike DNA strands, like basketball teammates into a larger, enduring "lattice" that can withstand the pressures of midlife crises, teen sex, professional greed, traffic accidents, and medical misconduct. Through it all, the Mosses remain an intact and amazingly healthy organism.