The Good Life

November 28, 2005


Reviewed by Alain de Botton

Jay 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.

November 1, 2005
Ü ber New York author McInerney's latest work reveals his favorite setting in the dark days following September 11. Corrine and Russell Calloway (introduced in "Brightness Falls") and Luke and Sasha McGavock are two fortysomething couples whose lives intersect and worlds collide as their city climbs out of the ashes. Luke, who had recently quit his job as a financial expert, had planned to meet a friend for breakfast at Windows on the World but left a voicemail that he couldn't make it. His friend is now missing. Living with her husband and six-year-old twins in TriBeCa, native New Englander Corrine needs to assert her connection to the city where she never felt she quite belonged. She and Luke meet at a makeshift soup kitchen set up at ground zero for rescue workers and police and firefighters. The specifics of that Tuesday are more muted than sharply defined; our protagonists might have met during any tragic event or even community gathering, ultimately forging a relationship based on mutual need and spousal disappointment. McInerney drops name after name as his New York takes on a life of its own, becoming as much a character as any of the two-legged kind. In truth, the story displays a more genuine richness when it moves south to Luke's Tennessee home town. Inveterate Gothamites will especially appreciate this love story between kindred spirits and between city dwellers and their wounded mecca. Recommended for public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 10/1/05.]" -Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal"

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2005
The reader might, upon beginning this novel, wonder why we care about 9/11's effects on four privileged Manhattanites: a retired corporate raider, a would-be screenwriter, a former model, and a book editor. But 9/11 was an unusual disaster in that a large proportion of its victims were well off (a possible explanation for why we aren't likely to see a flood of Hurricane Katrina novels)--and anyway, who has greater potential for character growth than self-absorbed rich people? This is really the story of two of the above, part of a cast meaningfully reassembled from " Brightness Falls" (1992), who meet as volunteers at a soup kitchen for rescue workers at Ground Zero. Both of them are in miserable marriages, and they're left shaken when the nation's worst day leads to the best days of their lives. McInerney probes the human response to tragedy, and the complexity of human desire, with both precision and empathy. He is a master at finding the truths we barely admit even to ourselves; without moralizing, he explores the ways we use disaster to our own emotional ends, and above all, whether we're really capable of change. A day that most people said would change us all forever seems now to have provided only a vacation from our bad habits. Like the marriages in this novel, the intensity of feeling just can't last. There have been a number of 9/11 novels lately, as writers grapple with what that terrible day means to us. This one is essential.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)