The Good Life

Switching gracefully between the echoing authority of the all-knowing narrator and the mortals who inhabit his world, Robertson Dean gives a fine performance. Two families are living "the good life" in lower Manhattan. The men cook, the women model or write screenplays. You need to own a jet to be rich. Move to the country? Never. John Cheever would be alive and well (albeit 94) if he'd only eschewed the suburbs. September 11th and then nothing looks the same. Police and firemen are so handsome that strangers kiss them on the street. But why live in the bull's-eye? Why am I married to this person? The exquisite lives unravel. And then ravel again. The lights are still burning in McInerney's beloved big city. B.H.C. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

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.

In his latest novel, Jay McInerney resurrects Corinne and Russell Calloway, the New York couple who were at the center of his 1993 work, BRIGHTNESS FALLS. The novel takes place during the aftermath of 9/11, as Corinne begins an affair with a man she meets at Ground Zero. Dylan Baker is effervescent in this recording, clearly having fun with McInerney's characters, who include Corinne's twin preschoolers, her ditzy sister from L.A., and a vacuous Manhattan socialite. Some of Baker's voices are clichéd, but it's done with irony, which is the whole point when you're reading McInerney. D.B. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine