| A poor couple living on a rural farm deal with the intrusions of the "outside world", including an affluent and worldly African-American math professor and her young daughter.
| Contributed by
Marge Bayer
I don't think there is any actual mathematics in Good Will.
So it may not really qualify for your list. But for some
reason Jane Smiley decided to make this character (Lydia
Harris) a mathematician and to specify that her field was combinatorics. (The latter was in response to a
question of what she taught.) Her husband was also
a mathematician, and they were experiencing the two-body
problem, living apart at the time.
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Note also that there was a stage adaptation (written for the Directors Company in NYC by Joan Rater and Tony Phelan) in 1998.
PS I assume the similarity between the title of this work and Good Will Hunting (1997) is just a coincidence...but could Matt Damon have read and been influenced by Smiley?
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