Only a writer of consummate craftsmanship and scope could write a novel about a series of real estate deals in a small town an hour and a half from New York City and make it so fully satisfying as to be thrilling. Jane Smiley has done it. She has tackled the shift in our country's attitude toward money during the dawn of the Ronald Reagan era: that moment in American history when suddenly it seemed there was free money to be had, thanks to changes in the tax code; when deal-making took on a brand-new sophistication; and when the conflict between developing and preserving land reached a turning point. Smiley's range is broad, her technique masterful as she explores the forces that upset the balance in love, in work, in a country's economy, in a region's ecology. The light note upon which "Good Faith" ends keeps it within the framework of the comic, but not without first giving a detailed and devastating look at the greed and corrupt business practices that ultimately brought the savings and loan industry and some of our country's major corporations and accounting firms to their knees. "Good Faith" is a cautionary prequel just right for our times. And great fun, to boot.

-- Jane Ciabattari

*

The Great Fire

A Novel

Shirley Hazzard

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 278 pp., $24

Shirley Hazzard writes for grown-ups. Her long-awaited new book, "The Great Fire," can be counted with "Middlemarch" as one of the few novels in English that can hold the attention of an adult without recourse to comedy, freakish plot turns or sentimentality. It is also a classic romance so cleverly embedded in a work of clear-eyed postwar sagacity that readers will not realize until halfway through that they are rooting for a pair of ill-starred lovers who might have stepped off a Renaissance stage. As readers of "The Transit of Venus" will remember, the greatest pleasure is Hazzard's subtle and unexpected prose. Of a robust military wife, she writes that she had "a piping voice, active with falsity." She describes another character as a man in whom "an intense, original lode of high feeling had been depleted: he was working, now, from a keen memory of authentic emotion." Never lyrical for the sake of lyricism, Hazzard's prose follows the sensible course of her characters -- open to beauty and alert to its dangers.

-- Regina Marler

*Great Neck

A Novel

Jay Cantor

Alfred A. Knopf: 710 pp., $27.95