Summer Books #3: The Good Life

I don’t know if I’ll really ever be able to describe why, but I’ve got a minor fascination with 9/11 literature. There’s Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, there’s DeLillo’s brand new Falling Man, and there’s Jay McInerney’s The Good Life.

Like most people who have read anything by McInerney, all I’d read of his was Bright Lights, Big City, which is an undeniably fantastic, frantic glimpse into 1980’s excess. Written in second person, the book is a scant 200 pages, though it reads more like 60.

You’ve probably been able to guess my problem, then. I went into The Good Life hoping to find the way that Bright Lights‘ unnamed protagonist handled the 9/11 assault on his Manhattan playground.

That’s there, though in a much different way. McInerney recycles characters from his fourth novel, Brightness Falls, where they had originally dealt with infidelity and forced maturity as they reached their thirties (or so Amazon.com tells me). That these were not original characters was unbeknownst to me until after I had finished the novel, but it really doesn’t come up.

But while Bright Lights played fast and loose, The Good Life is, well, plodding. The problems facing the characters are established early, and simply reiterated over and over for the next 300 pages. The illicit romance that the two main characters strike up in the weeks following 9/11 is loosely tied to the tragedy, but as I read on, I grew to question that connection, and the terrorism backdrop begins to feel exploitative (much like the novel’s original cover, pictured here which was replaced with this much better, or at least subtler, version for the paperback).

Honestly, this could have been a killer long New Yorker fiction piece, but alas, it isn’t.

The Good Life: **/5

Up next: Vonnegut’s Bluebeard.
Past reviews: High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, The Road by Cormack McCarthy