Collateral damage
Jay McInerney's latest offering fails to fully utilise the horrors of 9/11 to inject some much needed bite into the novel's real subject.
Last September, Jay McInerney wrote a curious essay for the Guardian. It began as a dissent from the contention, which appeared in these pages during the summer of 2005, accompanying an interview with VS Naipaul, that fiction had finally been rendered irrelevant by the events of 9/11 and their geopolitical aftershocks. But McInerney rather quickly veered into an account of his own struggle to write the kind of novel Naipaul had decreed unnecessary.
Another prominent writer, he noted, evidently had doubts as well: "When I told Mailer that my new novel took place in the autumn of 2001 he shook his head sceptically.'Wait 10 years', he said. 'It will take that long for you to make sense of it.' But I couldn't wait that long. As a novelist who considers New York his proper subject, I didn't see how I could avoid confronting the most important and traumatic event in the history of the city, unless I wanted to write historical novels. I almost abandoned the book several times, and often wondered whether it wasn't foolish to create a fictional universe that encompassed the actual event and whether my invention wouldn't be overwhelmed and overshadowed by the actual catastrophe. At the very least, certain forms of irony and social satire in which I'd trafficked no longer seemed useful. I felt as if I was starting over and I wasn't sure I could".
On the evidence of The Good Life, the novel in question, he should have paid more attention to Norman Mailer's advice. With a little additional time for reflection, McInerney might have conceived a more resonant fictional use of the literal horrors in Lower Manhattan. Instead, he's turned them into a Hitchcockian MacGuffin, a crowd-gathering catalyst to draw attention to the novel's real subject, an oddly listless and unappealing adulterous affair.
Despite all the attention, pro and con, that The Good Life will attract as a novel supposedly centered on the destruction of the twin towers, the book's central concerns are only tangentially related to the actual events of 9/11. What matters here are some fictional characters, a few of them recruited and updated from McInerney's 1992 novel, Brightness Falls. Faithful readers again meet Corrine Calloway, now approaching 42 and still married to Russell, a book editor. After a difficult procedure involving the transplanted use of her younger sister's eggs, she is the mother of school-age twins. Maternity has not, contrary to her expectations, eased Corrine's discontents with her life.
She fiddles, on spec, with a screenplay of Graham Greene's novel The Heart of the Matter and looks down on her husband for earning peanuts in a "city of zillionaires" (even though, with his grudging support, she left her job as a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney's office to bear children). For good measure, she also resents her sexpot sister, Hilary, whenever she shows up at their TriBeCa loft.
Meanwhile, uptown and upmarket, Luke McGavock spends his days mooning about in search of his soul. He has recently walked away from a seven-figure annual salary as an investment banker and rented a studio on East 76th Street, that noted hotbed of impoverished artists, a block south of his palatial apartment. There he will think about writing a book on Japanese samurai movies. Sasha, Luke's beautiful wife and the cynosure of the Manhattan paparazzi, doesn't understand him or why he has cut back the cash flow to her and their teenage daughter. "You have an MBA, for Christ's sake," she helpfully informs him. "You practically restructured the debt of Argentina." Luke's only response is to remark that Argentina is "about to default again". A man in search of a higher, if presently indeterminate, calling cannot be troubled with such ephemera.
After a few introductory episodes (in which the Calloways hold a dinner party, highlighted by a drunken female guest's denunciation of Corrine, and the McGavocks attend a benefit at the Central Park Zoo, where Luke fumes while watching Sasha boogie with her reputed lover), the planes hit the towers. Both couples lose a close friend in the destruction. Somehow, Corrine and Luke wind up working the night shift together at a soup kitchen on Bowling Green, providing food and coffee to the uniformed service members and construction workers laboring at ground zero.
Once they get acquainted, Corrine quickly steers their off-duty chats into suggestive areas. "Are hookers," she asks Luke, "really better at it than the rest of us?" He denies any such knowledge until she worms out of him, about five seconds later, an account of his experience with a Hong Kong prostitute. "Wow," Corrine responds. "That sounds good, I guess. Actually, it sounds painful, but I assume that's really good. From the guy's point of view, I mean. So you think sex is like, say, tennis or chess practice makes perfect?" In the background, the ruins of the World Trade Center and the bodies of its unrecovered victims smolder.
A yawning disparity ethical, moral, aesthetic: choose one or more or write in "other", exists between what Corrine and Luke talk about here and in the context of their conversation. But McInerney fails (or refuses) to acknowledge it, even by hinting that, yes, people regularly behave inadequately in the backwashes of calamities and that Corrine and Luke, a couple of selfish nitwits, more or less like most of us, are just such people. He evidently finds them fascinating and blameless And expects his readers to do the same.
The narrator of Bright Lights, Big City, McInerney's 1984 career-making debut novel, handled the topic of Manhattan celebrity allure with a shrewd mix of awe and contempt. In this novel, only the awe survives.
Corrine and Luke apparently deserve attention because they move in circles that sometimes intersect with those of the famous, occasionally even those of the ultra-cool one-name variety. "Salman" cancels at the last minute from the Calloway dinner party. A director who does show up regales a "rapt" table with tales of "me and Marty and Peter and the gang" back in Hollywood in the 1970s. Corrine and Russell attend a book party at "Nan's" and "Gay's" townhouse. When Sasha McGavock requires a frock for a society benefit, "Oscar" provides.
Perhaps recognizing that readers able to fill in these last names don't add up to the sort of numbers that produce best sellers, McInerney gilds such glitter by throwing in a steady stream of brand names, arcane and familiar, to attract the demographic of inveterate shoppers. Most of these circle around Luke, since he has more disposable income than Corrine. Early on, he and Sasha debate whether he should wear his Anderson & Sheppard tuxedo to the zoo benefit or, as his wife urges, the Ozwald Boateng she bought him in London. The fireplace of the McGavock apartment is adorned with "his matched sidelock Purdy 20-gauges". While he phones his widowed mother in Tennessee, Luke swivels in his Bank of England chair. When he needs to know the time, he checks his Rolex Yachtmaster. On a tryst to Nantucket with Corrine, Luke ventures out for supplies clad in LL Bean lace-up boots and a Barbour coat. He smokes, now that 9/11 has got him like Corrine and many others in the novel started again, Marlboro Lights, which he fires up with a Bic. Getting dressed for a pre-Christmas lunch at "21", Luke selects "a bird's-eye suit from Dunhill; a spread-collared shirt with red, white and green stripes that he thought of as his Christmas shirt, and a solid red Charvet tie". Unfortunately, that Dunhill suit is as empty as the novel it's wrapped in.p
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