Bad-boy writer captures essence of post-9/11 era
Vikas Turakhia
In the January 31, 2006 Cleveland Plain Dealer
A novel called "The Good Life" with jacket photos of ash-covered plates and the burning World Trade Center seems steeped in contradiction. Put Jay McInerney's name on it, and the work easily could be blasphemous and exploitative.
McInerney has broadened his bad-boy scope by writing about wine for House & Garden magazine, but most readers will remember him as a chronicler of the debauched in novels such as "Bright Lights, Big City," where wealthy partygoers snort Bolivian cocaine in the bathrooms of clubs until 6 in the morning.
It doesn't seem like the right literary pedigree for a book grappling with Sept. 11, which is why McInerney's success in taking on the attack and its reverberations is a surprise. He distills the impact of Sept. 11, effectively portraying the overwhelming tragedy while demonstrating how it functions in the lives of people who must move on. The novel focuses on Corrine and Russell Calloway and Luke and Sasha McGavock, part of the "largely insulated" demographic the author knows best: women "for whom the drape of the garment and the shape of the eyebrow were subjects of advanced study" and men financially secure enough to leave their jobs and pass time aimlessly searching for some true calling. At the story's start, both marriages teeter on collapse, strained by affairs and indifference. Corrine and Russell lead separate lives under the same roof as she focuses on the children and he on his work as a literary editor. Luke's feelings for his socialite wife have disintegrated to where he views her "as a courtesan to whom he happened to have proprietary rights." The massive jolt of Sept. 11 moves these couples out of stasis toward re-evaluating their situations and finding something meaningful. For Corrine and Luke, this means volunteering at Ground Zero, and while their struggles at home continue, they slowly come together. Like other books on the terrorist attacks, such as Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," McInerney's novel has what might become set pieces of the emerging genre. "The Good Life" provides horrific descriptions from the day itself, particularly about the people who jumped from the World Trade Center, "falling slowly and then suddenly exploding like rotten fruit on the concrete." It also captures the haunting atmosphere of New York right after the attacks, recalling the impromptu sidewalk galleries of "faces of the missing glancing back hopelessly and artlessly" and the firefighters working at Ground Zero, who "were like ghosts, in another place even when they stood in front of the coffee urns." But McInerney hasn't composed a sentimental book, and even within the public's reaction to the attacks, he finds something to satirize. Contact information for a person running a soup kitchen briefly becomes "the equivalent in value to the private reservation number of a top restaurant." And Cipro prescriptions serve as party favors at a plastic surgeon's dinner party. Unlike the characters in Foer's novel, Corrine and Luke aren't looking for catharsis. Their lives are undoubtedly affected by the attacks, but Sept. 11 recedes into the background, providing a context and catalyst, but not most of the drama. Rather than being about Sept. 11, "The Good Life" is about incorporating it into our recent history. And while much has undoubtedly changed because of the attacks, McInerney demonstrates that, for better or worse, humans adapt. Some readers will find his view cynical, but few people will deny its truth.
