Aging yuppies meet amid the rubble of 9/11, which parallels the rubble of their respective marriages. This is Jay McInerney’s New York City awash in adultery, name-dropping, name brands, private schools and expensive booze.
With its somewhat predictable plot, albeit one that takes a redemptive turn, McInerney’s seventh novel, “The Good Life,” focuses on protagonists Corrine Calloway and Luke McGavock. Their marriages and their spouses (to say nothing of themselves) long since have lost their bloom.
Corrine believes her husband, Russell, a 40-something editor at a major New York publishing house, has been having an affair with his assistant. But she has problems of her own as she tries to get back into the job force when her children start first grade.
Luke has seen his wife, Sasha, a 20th century Delilah with Barbie doll features (replete with face lifts and personal trainers), in compromising positions with the socially prominent philanthropist, Bernie Melman. But shaken by the untimely death of his preacher father, Luke has decided to ignore his wife’s infidelity, to quit his job and to live on his investments while searching for his inner self.
Two invented stories told from two points of view are set against two actual stories. One takes place in 2001, the other at the end of the Civil War. (Luke visits his hometown, Franklin, Tenn., site of the McGavock plantation and Civil War cemetery and has a heart-to-heart talk with his mom.) The resulting convoluted tale is an old fashioned boy-and-girl-find-each-other-and-find-the-meaning-of-life story.
Corrine and Luke meet as Luke trudges his way home in the dramatic circumstances following 9/11. It’s the day after, which McInerney aptly calls “Ash Wednesday,” and Luke, covered with a talcy ash, is still raw and bloodied from being trampled by people hoping to escape the blast. Although the street and sidewalk are deserted, he sees one other person – Corrine – approaching him.
McInerney perfectly captures the sensation of getting hit in the solar plexis and living through it. As he describes the dust and rubble of Ground Zero, the circumstances of the attack seem both literal and figurative: The destruction from the two towers suggests the disintegration of the two marriages, the disintegration of New York City and of life as the characters know it.
Corrine and Luke soon feel they are living in a time when everything, especially their relationship, is larger than life.
Other parts of the novel feel like clichés. Corrine, for example, can’t remember the last time she had a meaningful conversation with Russell. Nor can Luke remember the last time his wife had a kind word for him. Come on.
It’s hard to believe that Russell and Sasha are so uncaring, belittling and vapid that they don’t deserve Corrine and Luke, whom McInerney tries to portray as soulmates. With all the infidelity, that high mindedness is difficult to accept. Predictably, the question becomes: Should the protagonists forsake all others and divorce their spouses? Yes and no. There are children involved.
The Calloways have Jeremy and Storey, adorable 6-year-old twins – courtesy of Corrine’s sister, Hilary (another Barbie lookalike) who served as egg donor in an odd sort of subplot and who now may want to exert her birth mother rights. And the McGavocks have Ashley, their troubled 14-year-old daughter who is caught up in drugs and kinky oral sex.
Then comes the reality check known as 9/11. How will that cataclysmic event affect the Calloways and the McGavocks? How indeed?
“The Good Life” has more substance than McInerney’s usual stories of sex and sin among New York City yuppies, mainly because the protagonists have a conscience or a semblance of one. Even the title is a pun suggesting the materialism of the characters as well as the moral issues with which they grapple. While there’s still plenty of illicit sex, there are also feelings of guilt, which is where the setting comes in: Manhattan in the four months following Sept. 11 would make even the most sybaritic think twice.
In addition to everything else it causes, 9/11 pushes McInerney’s characters to grow up. They’re in their 40s (a little late), but with a pampered youth and privileged years spent in prep schools and Ivy league colleges, the two couples possess an extreme sense of entitlement, one that has kept them in a state of late adolescence. With money, power and prestige, they live in apartments in TriBeCa and on 77th Street, replete with French furniture, Flemish art, Chinese porcelain, silk damask and Persian carpets. They know VIPs like authors Grace Paley and Salman Rushdie. They eat at exclusive restaurants and leave tips of $50 or more.
The Calloways experienced an especially long adolescence. Introduced in “Brightness Falls,” McInerney’s earlier novel – another play on words – which is referenced several times here, the Calloways lived through the Wall Street crash of 1987 and Corrine’s affair with Russell’s best friend, who later killed himself. (For the details, read the background novel.)
Now according to McInerney, another kind of brightness falls, with the emphasis on the first word/noun suggesting both the brightness of the explosion and the dark days following it. In lesser hands, the pun would fall flat, but McInerney brings the right mix of poetry and pathos to the term, making it a metaphor for the terrorist attack as well as for the personal lives of the characters.
He’s adept at using the just right figure of speech to sketch a scene or a character, as in this humorous description of Luke’s suit: “The garment in question was cut like a cigar tube and made him look like an Oscar nominee advised by an overzealous team of stylists.” McInerney can also be profound as in this description of the state of mind caused by 9/11: “the sad satori flash of acute wakefulness and connectedness that had followed the initial confrontation with mortality.”
Ultimately, McInerney shows that the vivid events that unfolded on the bright Tuesday morning of Sept. 11, 2001 made ordinary life seem like a dream. When the two towers burst into flames, they incinerated not just buildings and human lives but also values and relationships, including the bedrock relationships between husband and wife, parents and children. In their place was a state of mind in which everything seemed apocalyptic. But was this an illusion? Was it just another way to avoid responsibility? That’s the central question in the novel, and McInerney’s answer will surprise everyone.
Diane Scharper is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a professor at Towson University.
“The Good Life”
By Jay McInerney
Knopf, 353 pages, $25
