Do we become good through suffering? Jay McInerney's The Good Life is a novel about the effect of hardship on people for whom things come too easily, written by an author for whom things come too easily. "Things" for the characters encompass money, material possessions, sex, and, most importantly, security—physical and mental. The two New York City couples at the center of the novel, one TriBeCa bobos, the other Upper East Side snobs, live "the good life" as most of us understand it today. If they are not always happy or good, their misfortunes and misdeeds take place within a highly circumscribed frame of possibility.

Luke the retired investment banker is married to Sasha the beautiful and unfaithful socialite; Corrine the bored stay-at-home mother of two is married to publisher Russell, who she has just discovered is cheating on her with a secretary. If the construction of the parallel couples seems transparent, it is. Luke and Corrine lead lives of understimulation and overcomfort while their respective spouses pursue success socially and professionally. After losing friends in the World Trade Center, both attempt—awkwardly, uncertainly, ineptly—to create a life newly attuned to the possibility of death.

They meet on September 11 and begin a romance amidst the wreckage of the towers, working late nights at an impromptu soup kitchen. The narrative is familiar: tragedy leading to self-examination, recognition, and conversion. The attacks and their aftermath expose the shallowness of the "good life" they pursued for so long, and make them search for a better one. "Better" is of course ambiguous. Luke and Corinne yearn most of all for something to yearn for, for an object of desire to replace the objects they have pursued in the past (money, family, success) that now prove cold comfort in the face of such massive evil and suffering. The questions posed are weighty and existential, and McInerney mostly avoids the pitfalls of offering pat—or, indeed, any—answers.

It is hard not to see the four protagonists as stand-ins for McInerney, the literary wunderkind whose high-living exploits have made him perpetual fodder for 90's gossip columns. To him, too, conventional success came easily. His storytelling gifts allow him to write with a self-assurance characteristic of the best living novelists. Like his characters, though, he is in a rut. He writes perpetually in the shadow of his 1984 breakthrough Bright Lights, Big City, and his continual focus on rarefied NYC society has increasingly read as tired and stale. Yet his gifts and his potential remain. He is not a probing or an insightful writer, but he propels a narrative with verve, his characters (if stereotyped) are well-drawn, and he speaks in a voice acutely sensitive to rhythm and language.

McInerney's security as a novelist, like the security of his characters, was shaken by the events of 9/11. The Good Life reads as an attempt to sort through what changed on that day. The drama of the event and its aftermath created an expectation in all of us of dramatic consequences—of an anagnorisis to follow the peripeteia. This parallels a development in McInerney's own life, as he tries to grow out of the enfant terrible model that nurtured his success as a novelist and celebrity. Can these five immature souls grow into adults in response to the loss of innocence that was 9/11?

The novel's strategy of "mastering" loss hinges, in my reading, on Luke's retrospective narration of the events of September 11. In refutation of V.S. Naipaul's pronouncement that the novel, after 9/11, is dead (which McInerney explicitly addressed in a much-discussed Guardian article last September), the scene suggests that narrative is therapeutic, that simple retelling is itself a way of dealing with tragedy. In the middle of an idyllic weekend on Nantucket, Luke recalls searching through the rubble for his friend:

For some reason, I couldn't make myself leave, feeling like it should've been me in there, that I'd never done anything in my life to justify my surviving. And maybe this was the first time in my life I had a chance to do something important.

Luke's telling of the story, embedded in a moment of newly discovered love and tenderness, represents a kind of salvation for him. This recounting is a kind of bildungsroman for its speaker, who understands his individual development only when he views it through the lens of tragedy. For McInerney, too, personal narrative is the means of overcoming events that seem to dwarf any attempt to capture them. The novel's focus on the particular is the only way of coming to grips with the magnitude of such events. The moment of loss for McInerney and his characters is a moment of clarity in one's view of oneself, of a knowledge that seems to change one for the better.

Yet the novel's greatest success comes in the way it undercuts this reading. Ultimately, the salvation promised by retelling proves elusive. Luke and Corinne's romance cannot last, as they are pulled back into the concerns of the life they lived before the attacks. Family ties for both are insoluble, and bind the two to their pre-9/11 selves. Their desire for reinvention is thwarted by a brief encounter between their families at a performance of The Nutcracker, in which they are reciprocally confronted with each other's "good life." The conversion they had hoped for is illusory; Luke and Corrine are so much formed by their past that they cannot grow out of it:

Now he saw only sadness, and her embarrassed recognition of what had just happened—an event that in its outward aspect was as subtle as a shift in the breeze, but which was even now carrying them away from each other like two small crafts on separate currents.

The echo of the enigmatic final words of The Great Gatsby is clearly intentional; McInerney is often compared to Fitzgerald and is on record as a devotee. But where Gatsby and the suddenly inclusive "we" of the closing are "borne back ceaselessly into the past," McInerney's characters are borne, it seems, into the future. The narratives of Luke and Corrine's lives were interrupted by 9/11 and set briefly into harmony, but this disruption proves just one bend in a continuous progression. For McInerney, too, the novel endures the rift caused by 9/11, incorporating the actions and emotions into itself without substantially altering. Luke, Corinne, and their creator are the same people they were on September 10, 2001. Only now they have more stories to tell.

 

Joshua Billings concentrates on Classics and German, lives in Leverett House, and is fond of aspect.