You can’t say Jay McInerney, whose new novel, “The Good Life,” traces the lives of several New Yorkers in the days after the bombing of the World Trade Center, wasn’t warned. Writing in the British newspaper The Guardian in September, he alluded to a conversation with Norman Mailer soon after he had embarked on his book. “He shook his head skeptically,” McInerney writes of the older writer.
” ‘Wait 10 years; it will take that long to make sense of it.’ ”
Not bad advice. After all, Tolstoy wrote his classic account of the Russo-French conflict of 1812 after 50 years had gone by. And Stephen Crane’s great novel of the Civil War was published in 1895, 30 years after the war had ended. It takes a while to digest these things, Mailer seemed to be saying. But McInerney wrote, “I couldn’t wait that long. As a novelist who considers New York his proper subject, I didn’t see how I could avoid confronting the most important and traumatic event in the history of the city.”
Hard to sympathize with these folks
OK, but as a native New Yorker, I have to say I wish McInerney had found more appealing characters to carry his fictional water. Beyond the incessant name-dropping (he mentions Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Franzen, Nan and Gay Talese, and that’s just the beginning), and the incessant attention to trivia (the designer furniture, drugs, wine, take your pick), which has little or nothing to do with the reality of life for most of the 8 million people who live in New York, the people in these pages are difficult, if not impossible, to like and sympathize with. Tom Wolfe did a better job of limning this group with “Bonfire of the Vanities,” his 1987 satirical demolition job of Manhattan high life. But, thankfully, Wolfe didn’t ask us to empathize with his characters; he seemed to despise them himself.
As sophisticated as McInerney’s characters want to believe themselves to be, they are really as self-absorbed as teenagers at the mall, constantly watching others for their cues, attuned to the very latest in haute couture. The people in this novel are beset with such problems as ferocious increases in private-school tuition, the cost of a third home in the country and the difficulty of getting a good haircut. There is constant chatter about the “in” place to eat or drink and who among the elite is sleeping with whom. One is slightly amazed that adults really care so much about this stuff, but McInerney’s depiction of a certain group of Manhattan social climbers seems painfully accurate.
This isn’t the real problem with the novel. It would be like objecting to Dickens or Balzac. Read any magazine or newspaper if you doubt that a preoccupation with trivia is now our national pastime. McInerney considers himself an acute observer of the social scene, and everyone who has followed his career since “Bright Lights, Big City” knows he can write, even if occasionally his prose is so purple it would make Theodore Dreiser wince.
No, the difficulty with this novel is that while McInerney’s title is obviously ironic, everything it describes in the opening pages is immediately thrown into sharp relief after the bombing. It couldn’t be otherwise. The enormity of Sept. 11 has the effect of shrinking the importance of anything else. As McInerney himself has written, “I often wondered whether it wasn’t foolish to create a fictional universe that encompassed the actual event – whether my invention wouldn’t be overwhelmed and overshadowed by the actual catastrophe.”
Exactly. There is much talk about the anxiety and fear engendered by the bombing in the book, and there are some marvelous descriptions of two characters who end up volunteering at a lower Manhattan soup kitchen (as McInerney says he did himself) and have an affair. But the novel devolves into melodrama. McInerney’s characters do come into contact with some of the lower orders at Bowling Green and see a few cops and firefighters, but one wonders if it’s enough to save the book.
Most reviewers of “The Good Life” seem to think not, but critics appear to concentrate on McInerney’s loving descriptions of parties, wine and food and, in the process, miss the dead-on irony with which these events are treated. And even with its failings, it seems that in having written “The Good Life,” McInerney deserves credit for at least attempting to take on the big issues, unlike many so-called serious novelists writing today.
What drags the book down is the generic difficulty Mailer may have been alluding to in writing too close to the fact, in trusting a fictional depiction to have sufficient power to render such a recent event. As McInerney himself feared, the reality of a terrorist attack inevitably will overshadow any personal drama in a novel.
Is it still too soon?
There have, of course, been great books about traumatic occurrences. One thinks of John Hersey’s classic “Hiroshima,” written almost immediately after that bombing, and Michael Arlen’s superb “Passage to Ararat,” which chronicled the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks. Elie Wiesel’s “Night” is a moving and horrifying memoir of life in the death camps. But we’re still waiting for the great novel of the Holocaust, and it’s interesting to note that Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” attacks this from a slanted perspective, inventing horrors that didn’t occur, perhaps because the reality is too daunting.
One feels like ultimately fiction is the most effective means of handling tragedy or dealing with grief, because it involves projecting emotion into a dramatic context. But perhaps this can’t happen too soon. The great novel about Hurricane Katrina or the tsunami in Southeast Asia will be written later, if it’s written at all. In the meantime, take this as a minority opinion that critics are being too hard on McInerney or at least attacking him for the wrong things.
Tragedy of any kind often has the effect of stunning us into silence, but writers have obsessions, and the Sept. 11 attack was McInerney’s at this time in his life. I honor writers who write passionately about things that matter, and the evidence of that is on every page of “The Good Life,” whether or not one judges it to be finally successful as fiction.
David Milofsky is a Denver novelist and professor of English at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.
