The Good Life [Hardcover]

Jay McInerney (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 31, 2006

Hailed by Newsweek as “a superb and humane social critic” with, according to The Wall Street Journal, “all the true instincts of a major novelist,” Jay McInerney unveils a story of love, family, conflicting desires, and catastrophic loss in his most powerfully searing work thus far.

Clinging to a semiprecarious existence in TriBeCa, Corrine and Russell Calloway have survived a separation and are thoroughly wonderstruck by young twins whose provenance is nothing less than miraculous, even as they contend with the faded promise of a marriage tinged with suspicion and deceit. Meanwhile, several miles uptown and perched near the top of the Upper East Side’s social register, Luke McGavock has postponed his accumulation of wealth in an attempt to recover the sense of purpose now lacking in a life that often gives him pause—especially with regard to his teenage daughter, whose wanton extravagance bears a horrifying resemblance to her mother’s. But on a September morning, brightness falls horribly from the sky, and people worlds apart suddenly find themselves working side by side at the devastated site, feeling lost anywhere else, yet battered still by memory and regret, by fresh disappointment and unimaginable shock. What happens, or should happen, when life stops us in our tracks, or our own choices do? What if both secrets and secret needs, long guarded steadfastly, are finally revealed? What is the good life?

Posed with astonishing understanding and compassion, these questions power a novel rich with characters and events, both comic and harrowing, revelatory about not only New York after the attacks but also the toll taken on those lucky enough to have survived them. Wise, surprising, and, ultimately, heart-stoppingly redemptive, The Good Life captures lives that allow us to see–through personal, social, and moral complexity–more clearly into the heart of things.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon.com Exclusive: James Frey Reviews The Good Life

Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City was initially released in 1984. Twenty years later it is still an important book, and it has been an influence on a generation of writers, including me. McInerney's career since has been one of highs (Brightness Falls, The Last of the Savages) and lows (Ransom, The Story of my Life). He became a wine columnist, married and divorced, became a father to a pair of twins. In New York, he has remained a highly visible public figure, regularly seen at book parties and on the gossip page. Outside of New York, many people seem to have forgotten him. Often, when I bring up his later works, people respond with something along the lines of--I didn't know he wrote anything after Bright Lights.

The writer whose career McInernery's most resembles is that of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Both achieved huge, almost overwhelming early success. Both struggled to work their way out of the glare and expectations of that success. Both became known as much for their lifestyles as much as their books. While Fitzgerald wrote a masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, that McInerney, or almost anyone for that matter, has yet to match, McInernery has done something that may, over time, prove to be more interesting: he's lived through the downs of his life, continues to work, and is producing the kind of books we might have expected from Fitzgerald had he lived past the age of 44.

His latest book, The Good Life, is, in my opinion, his best book since Bright Lights, Big City. It tells the story of two Manhattan couples around the days of the events of September 11th. Luke and Sasha, wealthy Upper-East side socialites, and Russell and Corrine, a downtown literary editor and his wife, who were the subject of the earlier book Brightness Falls, are sleepwalking through their lives. They have parties and go to parties, live with spouses they're no longer sure they love, struggle with the correct way to raise their children. Luke is a banker who left his multi-million dollar job in search of something more fulfilling, while his wife is cheating on him with a former rival. Corrine is a stay-at-home mother whose husband is more concerned with work and other women than his family. Neither Luke nor Corrine see any way out of their marriages. Both end up working at a soup-kitchen near Ground Zero in the days immediately following the attacks on the World Trade Centers. They fall in love. They plan a future together. It's a simple story, a basic love story, and in the hands of a lesser writer, The Good Life could be awful. Instead, it's a very subtle, incredibly insightful, heartbreaking story about life in the New York, about marriage, about children and the choices they force us to make, about love and longing, about the search for meaning in our lives. It's a book about hope and how we find it, sustain and lose it, and it's a book about loss and how we deal with it.

It's also a deeply personal book, McInerney's most personal since Bright Lights, and it feels to me like I'm reading about variations of McInerney's own life. He, like Fitzgerald, is at his best when he's putting his own experiences into the lives of his characters, and I've never felt more of McInerney, or felt more vulnerability, which to me is a sign of strength in a writer, Unfortunately, Fitzgerald's life was unsustainable. He died drunk, penniless, alone, forgotten. McInernery could have followed his path, and it sometimes seemed like he would. Thankfully he didn't. People wondered what kind of writer Fitzgerald might have been had he lived. McInerney, his closest succesor, is starting to show us. --James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard

From Publishers Weekly

[Signature]Reviewed by Alain de BottonJay 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.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition. statees edition (January 31, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375411402
• ISBN-13: 978-0375411403
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.8 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (69 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #843,608 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jay McInerney is the author of Bright Lights, Big City, Ransom, Story of My Life, Brightness Falls, The Last of the Savages, Model Behaviour, How It Ended and The Good Life. He lives in New York and Nashville.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read this book, April 23, 2006

By 

Noirgirl "Noirgirl" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Good Life (Hardcover)

Like a couple of the other reviewers I experienced 9/11 in downtown Manhattan, and it still upsets me, obviously, so I was not sure I was ready to read a book about it yet. I almost could not even stand looking at the cover art. But I trust Jay McInerney, one of my favorite New York writers, so despite my initial reluctance I decided to give it a try. I am really glad I did.

I was very surprised by a few of the bad reviews here. But I also notice that a lot of the people for whom this book resonated the most were New Yorkers. This book for me, also, is the first post-9/11 piece of creative work (fiction, art, whatever) that I really related to and thought captured a lot of what I felt and still feel about experiencing 9/11 in New York. It did so in a beautifully written, emotionally moving way without exploiting or being trite or missing the point. If you were there (and of course even if you weren't) I think this book is really important to read.

The book is not so much about the actual experience of 9/11 but the grieving and healing process afterward that was so particular and shocking and unreal for a lot of us. It is somehow very cathartic to read about these characters going through their recovery from 9/11 in such simple, everyday, yet momentous ways. The emotions in the book are real and they are more complex than they seem. I related to so many of them, especially as they were displayed in the central relationship of the book. Far from being "maudlin," I thought that relationship really beautifully captured the sentimentality and idealism that a lot of people demonstrated even in the face of terror. It was a little more sentimental than your usual McInerney book in that way - but the book also dealt with a lot of dark subject matter and dark feelings, so I thought the sentimentality was okay and hopeful to throw into the mix.

For me, this was one of those rare experiences where reading a book can help you understand things better in a way that can almost be described as enlightening. Like another reviewer, I was really moved by the ending, and re-read that part several times.

Critiques of how this book only deals with a certain class of people, or that the author is overly impressed with upper-class people, etc. etc., for me sort of miss the point. First of all, that class of people is who McInerney always writes about, and he writes them well. If you have a problem with reading about those people, you shouldn't be reading this author. Second, no matter what class you think you belong to or you prefer to read about, the way this book was written and the issues and emotions it explores will probably move you if you are open to it. Definitely read this book. You won't be sorry.

25 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Lights Out, March 6, 2006

By 

Tom Casey Reviews (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Good Life (Hardcover)

If you have gained a reputation as an important writer, it is part of the game to hold claim to the territory. Commercial culture and the swell of mediocrity in American entertainment have seen a degradation of language arts that tells a story of low expectations, complacency, and indifference to excellence in the general population. If there is no demand for quality there will be no supply. For this reason the responsibility of writers to hold to a high standard is greater today, but the seductions of an undiscriminating marketplace are also great for those writers whose name will sell books.

The Good Life is a terrible novel by a talented writer. It seems almost as though two Jay McInerneys conferred on the concept of this book, or a committee of Jay McInerneys, each with a bad idea voted into the final draft. Ground Zero in the aftermath of 9/11 is offered, without irony, as the central metaphor. But also, as if to underscore the barren existence of his characters, the children of Russell, an editor, and his wife, Corrine, are the spawn of eggs taken from Corrine's sister, Hilary, and artificially inseminated. The identities of the main characters are likewise artificially inseminated with place-names, clothing brands, and vague association with celebrities from the literary and money trades of metropolitan New York. "Salman Rushdie" and "Paul Auster" drop from the page with a dull thud, along with references to publishing houses, notable prep schools, the Hamptons, and Nantucket, until you have a sense that the author is inserting himself rather too insistently by implication as a veteran of these places for the same sterile reasons as his characters. "I am my watch, I am my prep school, I am my cuff-links," his people seem to say.

Curiously, the events of 9/11 and its aftermath have scant resonance in this book, though that day is meant as a flashpoint for radical changes that overtook New York City and its citizenry. But these characters are hardly representative, and they don't have feelings; rather they have a yearning to have feelings and so their empathy is hollow, and this is very unsatisfying to the reader in this context.

It's hard to understand how an author could labor for years on a book without soul unless he was unaware of it. Or it may be that an exasperated committee of Jay McInerneys took a poll and commercial interest defeated literary integrity with a sigh of ennui. The Good Life made the New York Times bestseller list last month, the first of his novels to do so.

16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars disappointing and without insight, March 31, 2006

By 

Read a lot (San Francisco) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Good Life (Hardcover)

The idea of this book intrigued me, but instead of an insight into the post 911 world, the book is full of simple ideas and shallow characters. I loved Bright Lights, . . . He should have stopped writing after that one. The book starts strong, but then loses it. Don't waste your time.