The Good Life: A Novel

Guilt, Desire and Ambition: Jay McInerney's Spoilt New York Lives

Ambivalence typically grips Jay McInerney's characters: they have desires that shame them, or spouses who embarrass them, or tastes they can't afford. They know they should know better than to make the mistakes they make (having affairs, taking drugs, trying to take over a company). They can't believe they are settled down in apparently stable and happy marriages; or they can't believe that they aren't.

McInerney's first, era-defining novel, the fine and very funny Bright Lights, Big City (1984), begins with two sentences that tautly contain this conflict: "You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are...".

In a twenty-something character, such paradoxes are endearing, you might say constitutive of the age. They fold neatly into stories of drinking and drug-taking, as the protagonist continues to trust that round the next corner -- after one more drink, one more line -- all will become clear, and chronic ambivalence will be put to rest in the form of the ideal woman finally met, or the great adventure gloriously launched, or the exhausted coma at last lapsed into.

Such rhythms formed the backbone of the comedy in Bright Lights, Big City, whose unnamed second-person narrator continually appealed to his own better or worse self (he found it hard to tell the difference) as he made his frantic, coke-fuelled journey through New York, alternately travelling in limousines in the company of drug lords and socialites, or hopping turnstiles in the subway, broke and alone. Although the novel drew comparisons with Salinger and Fitzgerald, McInerney's light touch and tight language has perhaps more in common with the work of P. G. Wodehouse, as he deftly details a winning, hapless young man getting into scrapes with girls, bosses and late, late nights.

(Bertie Wooster may have had a weakness for "the sauce", but if "blow" had been available to him it seems possible he too would have come to call it Bolivian Marching Powder and enjoyed extended metaphors about the armies of South America.) Even the name of the narrator's well-connected best friend, the devil in his ear, Tad Allagash, has a Wodehouseian beat to it.

As McInerney and his characters have grown up, the attitude towards intoxication has necessarily changed. There was just too much fun being had in Bright Lights, Big City for the word "addiction" to make an appearance, but by the time of Brightness Falls (1992) the author was, as the times demanded, taking the issue seriously, and in that novel he sacrificed a couple of his characters on opposing altars: Corrine Calloway, one of the protagonists, on that of sobriety (she gives up drinking and thereafter enjoys herself half as much); and Corrine and her husband Russell's close friend Jeff Pierce, famous bad-boy author, on that of the heroin addiction that indirectly kills him.

Taking drugs wasn't as funny any more, and if Russell and his friends still had entertaining mishaps when drunk, McInerney also made a point of framing the novel's narrative with an account of Jeff's internment at a drying-out clinic in rural Connecticut, drawn in grimly vivid detail, with flourishes of dark humour -- "detox admissions had doubled and trebled in recent years; depression was showing steady growth, but substance abuse was booming".

McInerney has continued to mine the territories of drug use and abuse (in subsequent works including The Last of the Savages, 1996, and Model Behavior, 1998), and his new novel, The Good Life, contains a visit to that same bucolic rehab facility -- made this time not by friends of the recovering addict, but by parents. Luke McGavock, a wealthy banker who recently got out of the game in order to spend more time with his family, has a tense session with his wife Sasha (a beautiful fashion maven who spends most of her time being photographed at charity galas in New York) and a counsellor who probes the couple on their own habits. The scene, in which the parents squabble over the fact that their daughter, Ashley, has played each of them for a prescription for Ritalin, and may have delved into her mother's stashes of Paxil, Dexedrine and Ephedra -- has a brittle comedy, as well as a touch of the melancholy that accompanies McInerney's exposure of these well-meaning types who have so obviously failed. You are not the kind of guy whose fourteen-year-old daughter would take an overdose of Vicodin -- but here you are.

In the McGavock marriage, we are meant to take Luke's side. He may have spent thirteen competitive years working long days and earning the vast sums of money that fund his wife and daughter's excesses -- but his heart is in the right place.

Both Sasha and Luke are Southerners (or were once), and this allows McInerney to draw one of his distinctive portraits of outsiders who buy into the promise of Manhattan glamour. Even as he repudiates Sasha's values and priorities, Luke sees himself in relation to her transformation:

The same thing happened, he supposed, to all of the eager boys and girls drawn to the brilliant glow of the city from Charlotte, Charlottesville, Pittsburgh, Pittsfield.... They gained their citizenship at the expense of their amazement.... When was the last time that any of them had even looked at those towers at the tip of the island, really? The same thing had happened to Luke, though he retained some of his capacity to be amazed -- if only at the rapidity with which Sasha had become the epitome of a certain rarefied type of urban sophisticate.

If it was the virtual collapse of Wall Street in 1987 that gave dramatic shape to McInerney's study of money and ambition in Brightness Falls, it is the literal, dramatic destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001 that shapes the narrative of The Good Life.

McInerney tracks his two couples -- the McGavocks and Russell and Corrine Calloway, now in their forties and the parents of two small children -- in the "Indian Summer" before the attacks of September 11, and then in the aftermath, when, separately, both Luke and Corrine are drawn to join a team making sandwiches and coffee for rescue workers and National Guardsmen.

(Luke has lost a good friend in the conflagration, as have the Calloways.) In the eerie, smoke-filled midnights under a makeshift tent, these two, unknown to each other before, come to seek the consolation provided by helping others, and incidentally find a deeper consolation with one another -- each of them unhappy at home and seeking refuge from the inadequacies of their marriages. In other words, the disaster brings two troubled souls together for a passionate adulterous liaison in the shadow of the city's great and fearsome loss.

Corrine's unhappiness is slightly more complex than Luke's, perhaps because we know more about Russell, who is not as simple a target as Sasha. Russell may have parallel failings -- he is seduced not so much by wealth as by celebrity, another frequently visited compulsion in McInerney's work, enjoying his association with cultural icons both real (Salman Rushdie) and imagined (the famed independent filmmaker Cody Erhardt). But he is an affectionate, involved father to the Calloway twins, Storey and Jeremy, as well as a dedicated friend and host. The novel opens, in a scene similar to one at the beginning of Brightness Falls, with a large, boisterous, of-its-time dinner party, where Russell shows off for a famous chef friend, waxing eloquent about the wine.

(McInerney pours his own oenophilia into both male characters in the novel; we know not to trust Sasha because she is an avid drinker of the despised Chardonnay.) Also, while Sasha has remained at a relatively safe remove from the terrorist attacks, in the McGavocks' Upper East Side home, Russell witnessed some of the destruction first-hand, from the Calloways' Tribeca loft, and was shaken by the sight of "the, as he put it, 'not-quite-tiny-enough' figures jumping out of the tower eight blocks away, close enough to distinguish between men and women.... Russell said he stopped counting after twenty-seven".

We know from McInerney's earlier portrait of Corrine that she has Florence Nightingale impulses; in many ways her thankless role in the previous novel was to be Russell's conscience, as his ambition and greed threatened to overwhelm him. Now, however, as McInerney sketches it, there is something selfish in Corrine's succumbing to the lure of Ground Zero:

Her initial desire to flee the city, clutching her babies, had partially subsided as she'd felt herself drawn beyond the barricades by an impulse no less compulsive than the old restlessness. She felt strangely at home at Bowling Green, near the epicenter of the trauma that had ruined their sleep and clouded their dreams.

That Corrine's relation to motherhood is vexed by a high-tech, genetic complication -- she carried the twins herself, but they were the product of a donor-egg fertilization made possible by her own wayward sister -- may bear on her conflicted feelings towards the home she and Russell have made together, but McInerney never quite makes this clear, though he includes a long excursion on the strangeness of the obstetric procedures and the precariousness of the twins' premature births.

Against the background of rescue workers and charred bodies, the novel essentially traces the arc of the affair between Luke and Corrine. As lovers do, they enjoy the sort of probing conversations they can no longer have at home (on subjects including international capitalism, the mysteries of male sexuality, family history and eating disorders) and contrive trysts in pleasing locations. The moral edge of the situation is blunted by the fact that both Sasha and Russell have confessed to previous sordid infidelities, thus liberating Corrine and Luke from much of their guilt. Besides, the premiss of Luke and Corrine's union is that they are good people trapped in lives that don't quite fit them: Luke no longer savours the shallow, luxury-encrusted life he leads (he would rather write his book on Japanese Samurai movies), nor does Corrine want to spend her time at parties thrown by Gay and Nan Talese (she would rather work on her screenplay of Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter).

The Good Life is lit by McInerney's satirical sparks: he enjoys catching the inanities of the over-moneyed in comments like, "You weren't really rich till you had your own jet", or "millionaire's become so meaningless -everybody's a millionaire". In some passages, however, his lightness of touch deserts him, and the weight seems to come less from the grim losses of 9/11 than from the burdens of a society he can't quite rise above. Whereas in Bright Lights a real-life figure like William Shawn was parodied elliptically as a magazine editor referred to simply as the Druid, in The Good Life literary celebrities are named and described, the portraits oddly duller as a result. If one strain in American writing in the 1980s was that of the "KMart realists" (such as Bobbie Ann Mason and Ann Beattie), the "Brat pack" writers, McInerney and his coeval Bret Easton Ellis, seem to have forged, by contrast, a Dolce & Gabbana realism: this novel's pages are heavy with wads of undigested contemporaneity in the form of brand names, Hamptons locations, celebrity chefs, chic restaurants -social references that will resonate among a select readership and remain, for others, flat on the page.

One of the most satisfying sections, finally, is Luke's visit to Tennessee to see his mother and his daughter, when Ashley escapes from the rehab facility and heads straight for her grandmother's horse farm. The exchanges between Luke and his mother about love and marital fidelity are layered and believable, and those between father and daughter touchingly difficult (reminding one that in Story of My Life McInerney proved himself an able ventriloquist of young socialite women, a trick he employs again here to great effect). Luke and his daughter decide together whether to embrace or reject the spoiled life in New York that has made them differently unhappy. Ambivalence is, in a sense, an inability to come to terms with loss: a wilful refusal to accept the narrowing of choices. When Jay McInerney's characters grow up, they have to face the families they have, rather than dwelling on the new connections they might make, and this proves to be a deeper source of sadness to them than the loss of the twin towers.

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