Product Description

In The Good Life, Jay McInerney unveils a story of love, family, conflicting desires, and catastrophic loss in his most powerfully searing work thus far.

Clinging to a semiprecarious existence in TriBeCa, Corrine and Russell Calloway have survived a separation and are wonderstruck by young twins whose provenance is nothing less than miraculous. Several miles uptown and perched near the top of the Upper East Side’s social register, Luke McGavock has postponed his accumulation of wealth in an attempt to recover the sense of purpose now lacking in a life that often gives him pause. But on a September morning, brightness falls horribly from the sky, and people worlds apart suddenly find themselves working side by side at the devastated site.

Wise, surprising, and, ultimately, heart-stoppingly redemptive, The Good Life captures lives that allow us to see–through personal, social, and moral complexity–more clearly into the heart of things.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #42230 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-24
• Released on: 2007-04-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Amazon.com
Amazon.com Exclusive: James Frey Reviews The Good Life

Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City was initially released in 1984. Twenty years later it is still an important book, and it has been an influence on a generation of writers, including me. McInerney's career since has been one of highs (Brightness Falls, The Last of the Savages) and lows (Ransom, The Story of my Life). He became a wine columnist, married and divorced, became a father to a pair of twins. In New York, he has remained a highly visible public figure, regularly seen at book parties and on the gossip page. Outside of New York, many people seem to have forgotten him. Often, when I bring up his later works, people respond with something along the lines of--I didn't know he wrote anything after Bright Lights.

The writer whose career McInernery's most resembles is that of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Both achieved huge, almost overwhelming early success. Both struggled to work their way out of the glare and expectations of that success. Both became known as much for their lifestyles as much as their books. While Fitzgerald wrote a masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, that McInerney, or almost anyone for that matter, has yet to match, McInernery has done something that may, over time, prove to be more interesting: he's lived through the downs of his life, continues to work, and is producing the kind of books we might have expected from Fitzgerald had he lived past the age of 44.

His latest book, The Good Life, is, in my opinion, his best book since Bright Lights, Big City. It tells the story of two Manhattan couples around the days of the events of September 11th. Luke and Sasha, wealthy Upper-East side socialites, and Russell and Corrine, a downtown literary editor and his wife, who were the subject of the earlier book Brightness Falls, are sleepwalking through their lives. They have parties and go to parties, live with spouses they're no longer sure they love, struggle with the correct way to raise their children. Luke is a banker who left his multi-million dollar job in search of something more fulfilling, while his wife is cheating on him with a former rival. Corrine is a stay-at-home mother whose husband is more concerned with work and other women than his family. Neither Luke nor Corrine see any way out of their marriages. Both end up working at a soup-kitchen near Ground Zero in the days immediately following the attacks on the World Trade Centers. They fall in love. They plan a future together. It's a simple story, a basic love story, and in the hands of a lesser writer, The Good Life could be awful. Instead, it's a very subtle, incredibly insightful, heartbreaking story about life in the New York, about marriage, about children and the choices they force us to make, about love and longing, about the search for meaning in our lives. It's a book about hope and how we find it, sustain and lose it, and it's a book about loss and how we deal with it.

It's also a deeply personal book, McInerney's most personal since Bright Lights, and it feels to me like I'm reading about variations of McInerney's own life. He, like Fitzgerald, is at his best when he's putting his own experiences into the lives of his characters, and I've never felt more of McInerney, or felt more vulnerability, which to me is a sign of strength in a writer, Unfortunately, Fitzgerald's life was unsustainable. He died drunk, penniless, alone, forgotten. McInernery could have followed his path, and it sometimes seemed like he would. Thankfully he didn't. People wondered what kind of writer Fitzgerald might have been had he lived. McInerney, his closest succesor, is starting to show us. --James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard

From Publishers Weekly
[Signature]Reviewed by Alain de BottonJay McInerney's new novel seems from the outside to be composed of the most disheartening elements: The Good Life is about a group of privileged New Yorkers who are led to reassess their lives—and become in many ways better people—in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The plot premise seems so pat and topical that the reader is likely to take fright. But there is mercifully no need. It is a tribute to McInerney's many talents that he can wrest from his schematic structure a novel that is both tender and entertaining.As often in McInerney's world, we find ourselves among a wealthy and ambitious elite, whom the novelist seems both intensely drawn to and repelled by. The focus is on two New York couples: Russell (publishing) and Corinne (screen writing), Luke (ex-banker) and Sasha (charity). McInerney brings an amusingly bitchy eye to bear on their lifestyles (for example, a character's double-height living room is described as appearing "to be holding its breath, as if awaiting a crew from Architectural Digest"). He keeps track of their snobbery and their social one-upmanship with all the attention to detail of a seasoned society columnist. New York resembles a latter-day version of imperial Rome in its last years, a once-noble civilization now shorn of its moral compass. In McInerney's New York, all citizens appear to take drugs, show off at charity balls, palm their children off on badly paid nannies and have sex with people other than their spouses. No one seems altruistic, high-minded, innocent—or plain nice.Then the planes strike the towers and two of the characters, Corinne and Luke, start to reappraise their faltering marriages. It becomes clear that the focus of McInerney's concern is not terrorism or politics but love: how relationships can disintegrate through children and routine, the tension between love and sex and what can keep a union alive. This is a novel about shallowness and what might replace it.For all of McInerney's surface cynicism, he's a writer—like Martin Amis perhaps—with whom, beneath the surface, there is a surprisingly simple, some might say naïve, ideal of goodness at work. Whenever this most cynical of writers has to reveal his allegiances, rather than his hatreds, they turn out to be remarkably homespun. The conclusion of the novel is undramatic. The characters may be searching for The Good Life, but their quest doesn't end up with the discovery of a holy grail. McInerney is describing a relentlessly secular world, where there are no easy sources of redemption. The characters end up finding meaning in those two stalwarts of the bourgeois worldview: romantic love and the love of children. This story is a simple one, but McInerney delivers it with grace and wit. He does what a good novelist should: he takes an abstract idea and gives it life. (Jan.)Alain de Botton is the author of On Love, Status Anxiety and How Proust Can Change Your Life, among other books.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Last September, Jay McInerney wrote a wonderful, nuanced essay about the impact of 9/11 upon fiction for the British newspaper the Guardian. He was writing in reaction to V.S. Naipaul's claim that the novel is dead -- that it's inadequate to address the post-9/11 era. McInerney's response was thoughtful. "Most novelists I know went through a period of intense self-examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks.... For a while the idea of 'invented characters' and alternate realities seemed trivial and frivolous and suddenly, horribly outdated." McInerney elaborated an impassioned defense of the novel as a mode of communication. His essay made me excited about his new novel -- which indeed involves the impact of 9/11 upon the lives of a group of McInerney-esque Manhattanites. Unfortunately, the book is a disappointment. In the Guardian, McInerney describes his struggle to create a fictional work that encompassed the catastrophe. "At the very least," he writes, "certain forms of irony and social satire in which I'd trafficked no longer seemed useful." This lack of irony, however, is a big problem for The Good Life. McInerney has always been at his best in the comic mode. He has a great eye for satirical detail and social foibles. His novels are often slightly confectionary, a little trashy even, but with the saving grace of soft-heartedness and an elegant, plummy descriptive style, which can be seen in the early pages of this novel: "The elevator doors opened on Luke's floor, revealing a tuxedoed Tupper Carlson, ruler of a downtown brokerage house and the president of the co-op, descending from the penthouse with his great blue heron of a wife, notable for her stick legs and prominent beak." So the novel starts off promisingly. We meet Luke, a fortysomething banker who has taken a sabbatical from work in hopes of finding himself and connecting with his socialite wife and rapidly maturing 14-year-old daughter. We are also reintroduced to two characters previously seen in McInerney's Brightness Falls, literary editor Russell Calloway and his wife, Corrine, who live in TriBeCa and attend parties with Salman Rushdie and Nan Talese and struggle to make ends meet while Corrine stays at home with the children. "Russell had initially supported her maternal ideal, though, as the years went by and their peers bought vacation homes in the Hamptons, he couldn't consistently disguise his resentment over their straitened finances." It's all very fin de siècle, funny and rather spooky. At one charitable affair, Luke is reminded "of the figures he'd seen ... in Pompeii and Herculaneum, frozen in their postures of feasting and revelry" -- a remarkable foreshadowing image, particularly if you take it with a grain of irony. Once disaster strikes, however, irony and humor are not too much to be seen. (There is one amazing little sequence in which wealthy mothers discuss whether Marine Corps or Israeli gas masks are better, and the difficulty of acquiring Cipro, the antibiotic for anthrax: "I was at Minky Rijstaefal's for dinner -- you know Minky; her husband's Tom Harwell, the plastic surgeon -- and it was so sweet: Folded inside the name cards at the table, we all had prescriptions for Cipro.") For the most part, though, such wonderfully, darkly comic moments are banished, and an earnest solemnity takes hold. The novel narrows its focus, and the plot follows a budding romance between Luke and Corrine. They're working for a makeshift soup kitchen that has sprung up near Ground Zero. Both have unfaithful spouses, both are soul-searching, both think a lot about wanting to be good people. Sadly, both are also pretty dull. You keep hoping that Luke and Corrine will get more interesting or sympathetic, but they do not. After a while, a lot of their self-examination and guilt and so on starts to come across as self-pity. Neither has lost anyone who is particularly close, and the catastrophe begins to seem more and more tangential, a romantically tragic backdrop. And Tragedy and Romance bring out bad things in McInerney. He has always had a sentimental streak, and in certain ironic and satirical contexts that has worked to his advantage. Here, however, he has nothing to counterbalance it. Corrine gushes out things like, "How are you, my angel?" and "I just needed to hear your voice. To verify my existence." The author tells us that Luke "wanted to be a student of her goodness and decency, a slave to her whims," and that Corrine had "never felt such craving, such desire to be possessed and filled, never known she had so much desire inside of her, so urgent a need...." One doesn't really know what to say. Honestly, it seems McInerney doesn't know what to do with this material. He skirts the complex observations and deep feelings discussed in his moving essays on 9/11. Perhaps the tragedy feels so sacrosanct, so enormous, that he has chosen not to apply the skills that are closest to his true talent, and what's left is this odd, stilted, earnestly tremulous book. But it's kind of scary. If Jay McInerney can't bring himself to write a Jay McInerney novel about New York during 9/11, then maybe Naipaul was right. Dan Chaon is a novelist and short story writer living in Cleveland.

Reviewed by Dan Chaon
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

What makes life good?
Jay McInerney's title is an germinal answer seeking the roots of a mystical question: what makes life good? New Yorkers tend to become immersed in lifestyles meant to accumulate maximum wealth in pursuit of their visions of the good life. They measure their worth by their clothes, cars, homes, jobs, children's schools, alma maters and their recognition on the vast moving ladder of a highly competitive, high society. 911 changed the perceptions of how many people viewed their own lives. Many came to realize that the relentless pursuit of wealth is a kind of life-denying madness. That materialistic pursuits are shallow and unfulfilling and short-lived. That a fixation upon status, and its symbols, shows a certain lack of depth and imagination. That the dogged pursuit of the good life means trading time one cannot regain to acquire material goods one really doesn't need. The meaning of McInerney's good life emerges as lessons from the Jay Gatsby School of Life. You can have everything and yet have nothing. You can make Faustian trades and lose your soul in the process and end up in a zero sum game with time expiring. To find the meaning of the good life, one must dig deeper. And 911 was a driver which hammered many complacent New Yorkers finally to ask the basic existential questions: What am I doing with my life? Where can I find sense in the wake of epic madness? Who am I really supposed to be? What really matters in life? 911 in New York for McInerney was a bit like Napoleon marching past Tolstoy's estate on the way to conquer Moscow: the writer so proximate to catastrophe and death on a grand scale needed to surge against and come to terms with both. I give him credit as a writer living in New York during 911 for taking on the task. I admire his, undoubtedly, highly autobiographical writing with its probable influence by Fitzgerald (Great Gatsby), Updike (Rabbit Run) and Saul Bellow (Augie March). He is an articulate voice with a fine editor. He poses many of the right questions arising from the ashes of 911 and then leaves it to his readers to determine what the good life really means.

overrated writer
I just read this book and I can't believe McInerney is ever mentioned in the same breath as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cheever, etc. He's not that great of a writer. When I am reading a truly talented writer, like say Kazuo Ishiguro, I know it. I can't exactly put my finger on it but I know I am reading someone who is masterful, and even if I don't especially love the book I am still aware of the excellence of the writing. McInerney doesn't give me that feeling. He is just not that good.

Disappointing
Many of the author's books are among my favorites, and Brightness Falls is in my opinion a masterpiece. I was really looking forward to reading The Good Life, which proved to be a shallow and uninteresting effort and an injustice to the great characters of Brightness Falls.