By: Jay Mcinerney Publisher: Vintage Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Vintage Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 384 Publication Date: April 24, 2007 Release Date: April 24, 2007
Product Description: In The Good Life, 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 wonderstruck by young twins whose provenance is nothing less than miraculous. 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. 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.
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.
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
What makes life good? Jay McInerney's title is an germinal answer seeking the roots of a mystical question: what makes life good? New Yorkers tend to become immersed in lifestyles meant to accumulate maximum wealth in pursuit of their visions of the good life. They measure their worth by their clothes, cars, homes, jobs, children's schools, alma maters and their recognition on the vast moving ladder of a highly competitive, high society. 911 changed the perceptions of how many people viewed their own lives. Many came to realize that the relentless pursuit of wealth is a kind of life-denying madness. That materialistic pursuits are shallow and unfulfilling and short-lived. That a fixation upon status, and its symbols, shows a certain lack of depth and imagination. That the dogged pursuit of the good life means trading time one cannot regain to acquire material goods one really doesn't need. The meaning of McInerney's good life emerges as lessons from the Jay Gatsby School of Life. You can have everything and yet have nothing. You can make Faustian trades and lose your soul in the process and end up in a zero sum game with time expiring. To find the meaning of the good life, one must dig deeper. And 911 was a driver which hammered many complacent New Yorkers finally to ask the basic existential questions: What am I doing with my life? Where can I find sense in the wake of epic madness? Who am I really supposed to be? What really matters in life? 911 in New York for McInerney was a bit like Napoleon marching past Tolstoy's estate on the way to conquer Moscow: the writer so proximate to catastrophe and death on a grand scale needed to surge against and come to terms with both. I give him credit as a writer living in New York during 911 for taking on the task. I admire his, undoubtedly, highly autobiographical writing with its probable influence by Fitzgerald (Great Gatsby), Updike (Rabbit Run) and Saul Bellow (Augie March). He is an articulate voice with a fine editor. He poses many of the right questions arising from the ashes of 911 and then leaves it to his readers to determine what the good life really means.
overrated writer I just read this book and I can't believe McInerney is ever mentioned in the same breath as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cheever, etc. He's not that great of a writer. When I am reading a truly talented writer, like say Kazuo Ishiguro, I know it. I can't exactly put my finger on it but I know I am reading someone who is masterful, and even if I don't especially love the book I am still aware of the excellence of the writing. McInerney doesn't give me that feeling. He is just not that good.
Disappointing Many of the author's books are among my favorites, and Brightness Falls is in my opinion a masterpiece. I was really looking forward to reading The Good Life, which proved to be a shallow and uninteresting effort and an injustice to the great characters of Brightness Falls.
Not one of McInerney's best efforts I have read and enjoyed Jay McInerney's writing before. I loved Bright Lights, Big City and The Last of the Savages. And, I even liked Brightness Falls, which contains two of the characters from this book. I very much expected to admire this book, but I was shocked at how much it pales in comparison to McInerney's other work.
The big complaint I have with this book is that the characters and dialogue just don't ring true. In the past this has been a strong point of McInerney. In this case, the Russell and Corrine characters seem to have been written by a completely different writer than the person who wrote Brightness Falls.
In fairness, the book is not terrible compared to much of what is on the bestseller list at any given time. The novel is structured well and the writing is stylistic and shows McInerney's knack for capturing the human journey through devastating events. But he has done this better before.
So, in the end, I can recommend the book as a decent read but if you haven't read McInerney before I would look for his other stuff ahead of this one. If you are a fan of McInerney I think you'll see a lesser version of him here.
Disappointing I was intrigued by the idea of a novel that deals with the lives of New Yorkers in the midst of the 9/11 tragedy. However, 9/11 was just a backdrop, and barely that. I expected to feel something, but we get so little emotion from any of the characters. I live about 1 1/2 hours away from NYC, but I remember how devastated my co-workers and I all felt when we got the terrible news. I understand that everyone reacts to tragedy in his own way, but the reactions of these characters were practically nonexistent. This event brought everyone together in many ways, but notably, families wanted to cling to each other and hold on. Not so for the characters in this book, none of whom are particularly likeable. I cannot imagine a mother leaving her children at home night after night while she goes out to follow her hormones. Everyone I know could not stand to have their children out of their sight. The extramarital activities were ridiculously cliche, and the reaction to the daughter's overdose was as if it barely registered with these self-involved adults. In addition to what I felt was complete unbelievability, I disliked the author's attempt to impress the reader with his vocabulary. Just because you know "big" words does not mean that they are the best ones to use to get your point across. It's not that he used words that I didn't know, it's just that his obvious effort to avoid ordinary language made the reading cumbersome, and I continually found myself wondering, why didn't he just say this?? This certainly wasn't the worst book I've read, but I don't feel it delivered on its promise. This was a topic that had great potential for emotional impact, but it fell short. Drop the 9/11 theme and you had a typical mediocre story of self-involved, unfaithful, spoiled adults. Its one redeeming feature was a small dose of reality and sanity shown by the characters at the end. It was ok, but I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend this book.
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