BOOK - "The Good Life"

If there's such a thing as the 9/11 novel, Jay McInerney’s The Good Life isn’t it. While the events in this book occur around that fateful day (which McInerney coyly labels nine/eleven), the narrative proceeds more or less as dinner party, dinner party, infidelity, dinner party. McInerney has a talent for that rich hipster lingo, but his momentum gets tangled in pointless dialogue and misplaced scenery, not to mention more than a few unfulfilled sub-plots and characters that get swept away by that most basic of plots: lust. Trapped in the limited perspectives of his socialite characters, McInerney can be neither lyric nor epic, and his attempts to do so come across as stilted and underwhelming. His poetic statement of ash and terror is a near miss to the characters, but far from a hit for the readers.

Of course, it’s hard to be poetic when your grand story is so damned ordinary. Even after going through every Rich White American stereotype in the book, McInerney still comes up short of anything interesting to say. Beneath the woefully overdone romance, there’s a delinquent, drug-addicted child (starving for attention), a mother addicted to all the “P” drugs (Paxil, Prilosec, &c.), two failing marriages (for the price of one), and tragic monetary problems (like figuring out how to get over losing that third house in the Berkshires). Nothing we haven’t seen a million times before.

As it turns out, nine/eleven is just a convenient excuse for McInerney to publish glorified Chick Lit, just as it’s a convenient excuse for his characters to have midlife crises. None of it comes across as tragic, either: the two protagonists, Corrine and Luke, are cuckolds even before they meet, and that they fall in love in the light of falling ashes, or build their relationship on the carcass of a mass grave, under the thin guise of volunteering to help the rescue workers . . . it’s almost disrespectful.

If McInerney’s goal was to paint a picture of undaunted normalcy, or to chronicle the attempt to maintain its cracking veneer, he has failed at that, too. His prose is filled with designer labels, “keen” observations that laugh at themselves (so that you don’t have to), and uneven lines that consistently find the wrong synonym. “"Hilary was preserved, in Corrine's mind, semifrozen at the age of fifteen, the last year they'd shared a domicile, so that it was always a surprise to see her as a woman, and a pretty convincing one at that." Domicile? Come on. Or as McInerney writes later, "This barely articulate accolade flummoxed its recipient." Showmanship, perhaps, in a greater work; here it exudes the slimy charm of the used-car salesman and his five-dollar words.

We may perhaps attribute the unevenness of this book to McInerney’s rush to get The Good Life out before the whole nine/eleven thing becomes too passé. (If that’s a jarring statement: good. People out there are commercializing on it, and if they’re going to do it so obviously, they should be called out.) "From the window, Luke looked out over the water towers of Fifth Avenue to the park, studying the senescence of the daylight, which seemed almost viscous, ready to coagulate--trying to register that perfect moment of transition from day to evening, that instant when the light, in dying, was most nearly itself." This is an unfinished book, and while beautiful moments like that exist, they seem forced, rather than joyously stumbled upon, ala Bright Lights, Big City.

Worse still, when McInerney does stumble upon a truth (“the night was never long enough when you were falling in love”), or one of his vivid, believable memories, he writes a justification for it a few lines later. Rather than rolling with it, pulling us along with his electric charm, we get summary: “‘You know, when you gave me that sandwich,’ he told her later, ‘if I acted strange, it was because it took me back thirty years.’” Good for the reader who is blissfully skimming along, but to any other reader, it’s slap in the face, as if to say, “Why are you taking me seriously?”

At one point in the novel, Corrine’s husband, Russell, "saddled with gloom," (and perpetually so, since he’s one-dimensionally portrayed) hears a lewd joke about sushi, and how the joker only eats it once a year, "'On the wife's birthday.'" He goes two blocks before he registers the joke, and it's a perfect parallel for the ineffective charms of The Good Life. We're so preoccupied with the social life of these characters and so distracted by all the heavy interstitial images, that if there's anything good about this life, we don't notice it. Unlike Russell, though, we don't even notice it two blocks down. It just sits there, lifeless on the page, doing nothing for the reader, and—if one can be truly honest—nothing for the author either.