Customer Reviews

The Good Life

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(15)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This was hyped as a return to form for McInerney, so having loved Bright Lights, I gave it a try. But he's way out of his league addressing serious themes. And the never-ending references to high-end consumer products made me want to scream. This isn't the 80s and that short of shorthand (or crutch) lost its lustre a long, long time ago in a galaxy far away. It's time to accept that Bright Lights was the one good book McInerney had in him. Like Brett, Tama and the Flock of Seagulls, Jay belongs to another era.

Specifically, you'd have thought that Russell and Corrine Calloway would've learned from what happened to them in the aftermath of the Stock Market Crash of 1987 (chronicled in "Brightness Falls").

Nah...they're still the shallow, selfish, self-absorbed people they were 14 years before.

The trouble is, you can't really tell whether McInerney thinks that's a good thing or a bad thing.

This novel follows up on the main characters of Brightness Falls. It seems tempting to be offered a sequel to that wonderful book, but the result is disappointing. Basically, this is a tawdry tale of marital infidelity and sexual obsession. It moves from one clich? to the next, and at times seems little more than a glorified penny dreadful. Where the earlier novel exuded a startling sense of realism, this one looses itself in gratuitous namesdropping and bombastic philosophizing. There is very little on offer to make us understand Corrinne's, Russell`s and Luke's vacillations, which appear to be exclusively hormone-driven. In the end, why they makes the choices that they do is completely unclear. The whole 9/11 context is an utter Fremdk?rper, weighing the novel down with connotations it isn't able to sustain. Had it been left out, this would have made very little difference to the story. Only very occasionally are there flashes of McInerney's former style, as in the final pages, which are peculiarly moving. But that is not sufficent reward after struggling through these 350+ pages, most of the time plain bored. If you have good memories of the Calloways from Brightness Falls, leave it that way and skip this, I'd say.

Glad that I only borrowed this from the library -- truly overrated, nothing special about the writing, and using 9/11 as a device for shallow people to "find themselves" needs a far better writer than this in order to work gracefully. Most of it is almost unreadable, except for the short part with some detail right after 9/11. Truly a disappointment, and not recommended for any type of reader.

Jay McInerney, Brat Pack novelist, Manhattanite extraordinaire and famed party goer, got the urge to step up to the plate and write a Great American Novel, a work that would raise him finally from the middle rungs of the literary ladder and allow him to reach the top shelf where only the best scribes--Hemingway! Fitzgerald! Thomas Wolfe!-- sit and cast their long collective shadow over the fields of aspiring geniuses, furious scribblers all. McInerney has selected a large subject with which to make his reputation, the catastrope that was and remains 9/11. Acutely aware that the minor league satires and soft coming of age stories that made his name were less commanding than they had been because "9/11 changed everything" (a phrase destined to be the characterizing cliche of this age) he offers us The Good Life, a mixed bag of satiric thrusts, acute social observation, two dimensional characterizations
and wooden generalizations about the sagging state of society, of culture, of our ability to understand one another, locally and globally.

I agree that Jay McInerney is a better writer than he's been credit, but history will judge his novels as minor efforts at best. Witty and observant, yes he is, but the manner in which he conveys his best lines, his choicest bon mots have the thumbed-through feeling of a style borrowed. Fitzgerald, Capote and John Cheever are his heroes, true, but there's nothing in McInerney's writing that honors his influences with the achievement of a tone and personality that is entirely his own, an original knack of phrase making that makes a reader wonder aloud how such wonderful combinations of words are possible. His influences, alas, are visible and seem to be peering over his shoulder. Even what one would praise as sharp and elegant observations from his keyboard creaks not a little. The style sounds borrowed, and our author sounds much, much too dainty to make it really cling to the memory:

"The hairstylist was aiming a huge blow-dryer at his wife's skull, which was somewhat disconcertingly exposed and pink--memento mori--in the jet of hot air ... "

"He developed an interest in the arts as well as a taste for luxury and was never hence quite able to make the distinction between the two, so that his ambitions oscillated between the poles of creation and connoisseurship."

McInerney is compared to Fitzgerald relentlessly since his career as a professional writer began, in so much he, like F.Scott, was bearing witness to a generation of conspicuous consumption and waste, but one notices that any random paragraph from The Great Gatsby
contains more melody by far. The writing genius of Fitzgerald, when he was writing at his absolute best,was his ability to make you forget the fact that you're reading elegant prose and have you become entranced by it. It was a means to put you in a different world altogether. It's this simple, really; you didn't see him writing, you didn't see him sweat. Able craftsman as well as peerless stylist when he was performing best, Fitzgerald's prose seemed natural, buoyant, unstrained. McInerney's writing reveals that strain, that slaving over phrase and clever remark,and often times the effect seems calculated.In his best moments, he rarely sheds the sophomore flash; after all these years our Manhattan golden boy still writes like the most gifted student in a Kansas City composition class. After all these years he is still trying to outrace the long shadows of those who brought him reading pleasure.

Jay McInerney's books are kept in the 'Cult Fiction' section of my local bookshop in Dublin. Whether this cult consists of congenitally self-centred Manhattanites, those who aspire to be them or simply those who take natural pleasure in seeing these fictional monsters consume their own children is unclear to me. I enjoyed going along for the ride in 'Brightness Falls' - and even had occasional moments when I felt genuine sympathy for the characters.

This sympathy evaporated in the course of 'The Good Life.'If anything it instilled in me a cynicism about 9/11 and the exaggerated role which it seems to have taken on in the NY mentality. After all, it was something which happened to *them*. Far from the characters' cliched mid-life crises being enobled by 9/11, it seems only to heighten the sense of their irrelevance.

All this would be okay if the author had the decency to poke fun at his protaganists, but instead he seems to invest each affair and contemplation of decamping to the suburbs with a sense of real despair. Corinne is the only character who is fully realised, but I lost interest in her about halfway through.

I am still planning to read 'Bright Lights, Big City' in the hopes that this book's lacklustre performance was a case of form imitating content - and that McInerney's characters were better before the various big collapses.

I've read almost everything else by jay mcinerney, and while I liked his books at the time, apparently I have outgrown him. This book is full of unsympathetic, shallow people behaving badly to one another, implicitly using 9/11 as an excuse. It's too bad because I liked Brightness Falls, to which this book is a sequel. Anyway, if you want to strongly dislike humanity and be repelled by some of the most embarrassing 'erotic' writing ever put to paper, go ahead and buy this book.