Product Description

Hailed by Newsweek as “a superb and humane social critic” with, according to The Wall Street Journal, “all the true instincts of a major novelist,” 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 thoroughly wonderstruck by young twins whose provenance is nothing less than miraculous, even as they contend with the faded promise of a marriage tinged with suspicion and deceit. Meanwhile, 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—especially with regard to his teenage daughter, whose wanton extravagance bears a horrifying resemblance to her mother’s. 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, feeling lost anywhere else, yet battered still by memory and regret, by fresh disappointment and unimaginable shock. What happens, or should happen, when life stops us in our tracks, or our own choices do? What if both secrets and secret needs, long guarded steadfastly, are finally revealed? What is the good life?

Posed with astonishing understanding and compassion, these questions power a novel rich with characters and events, both comic and harrowing, revelatory about not only New York after the attacks but also the toll taken on those lucky enough to have survived them. 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.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1932098 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-31
• Released on: 2006-01-31
• Formats: Abridged, Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Binding: Audio CD

From Publishers Weekly
[Signature]Reviewed by Alain de BottonJay McInerney's new novel seems from the outside to be composed of the most disheartening elements: The Good Life is about a group of privileged New Yorkers who are led to reassess their lives—and become in many ways better people—in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The plot premise seems so pat and topical that the reader is likely to take fright. But there is mercifully no need. It is a tribute to McInerney's many talents that he can wrest from his schematic structure a novel that is both tender and entertaining.As often in McInerney's world, we find ourselves among a wealthy and ambitious elite, whom the novelist seems both intensely drawn to and repelled by. The focus is on two New York couples: Russell (publishing) and Corinne (screen writing), Luke (ex-banker) and Sasha (charity). McInerney brings an amusingly bitchy eye to bear on their lifestyles (for example, a character's double-height living room is described as appearing "to be holding its breath, as if awaiting a crew from Architectural Digest"). He keeps track of their snobbery and their social one-upmanship with all the attention to detail of a seasoned society columnist. New York resembles a latter-day version of imperial Rome in its last years, a once-noble civilization now shorn of its moral compass. In McInerney's New York, all citizens appear to take drugs, show off at charity balls, palm their children off on badly paid nannies and have sex with people other than their spouses. No one seems altruistic, high-minded, innocent—or plain nice.Then the planes strike the towers and two of the characters, Corinne and Luke, start to reappraise their faltering marriages. It becomes clear that the focus of McInerney's concern is not terrorism or politics but love: how relationships can disintegrate through children and routine, the tension between love and sex and what can keep a union alive. This is a novel about shallowness and what might replace it.For all of McInerney's surface cynicism, he's a writer—like Martin Amis perhaps—with whom, beneath the surface, there is a surprisingly simple, some might say naïve, ideal of goodness at work. Whenever this most cynical of writers has to reveal his allegiances, rather than his hatreds, they turn out to be remarkably homespun. The conclusion of the novel is undramatic. The characters may be searching for The Good Life, but their quest doesn't end up with the discovery of a holy grail. McInerney is describing a relentlessly secular world, where there are no easy sources of redemption. The characters end up finding meaning in those two stalwarts of the bourgeois worldview: romantic love and the love of children. This story is a simple one, but McInerney delivers it with grace and wit. He does what a good novelist should: he takes an abstract idea and gives it life. (Jan.)Alain de Botton is the author of On Love, Status Anxiety and How Proust Can Change Your Life, among other books.
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From AudioFile
In his latest novel, Jay McInerney resurrects Corinne and Russell Calloway, the New York couple who were at the center of his 1993 work, BRIGHTNESS FALLS. The novel takes place during the aftermath of 9/11, as Corinne begins an affair with a man she meets at Ground Zero. Dylan Baker is effervescent in this recording, clearly having fun with McInerney's characters, who include Corinne's twin preschoolers, her ditzy sister from L.A., and a vacuous Manhattan socialite. Some of Baker's voices are clichéd, but it's done with irony, which is the whole point when you're reading McInerney. D.B. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
*Starred Review* The reader might, upon beginning this novel, wonder why we care about 9/11's effects on four privileged Manhattanites: a retired corporate raider, a would-be screenwriter, a former model, and a book editor. But 9/11 was an unusual disaster in that a large proportion of its victims were well off (a possible explanation for why we aren't likely to see a flood of Hurricane Katrina novels)--and anyway, who has greater potential for character growth than self-absorbed rich people? This is really the story of two of the above, part of a cast meaningfully reassembled from Brightness Falls (1992), who meet as volunteers at a soup kitchen for rescue workers at Ground Zero. Both of them are in miserable marriages, and they're left shaken when the nation's worst day leads to the best days of their lives. McInerney probes the human response to tragedy, and the complexity of human desire, with both precision and empathy. He is a master at finding the truths we barely admit even to ourselves; without moralizing, he explores the ways we use disaster to our own emotional ends, and above all, whether we're really capable of change. A day that most people said would change us all forever seems now to have provided only a vacation from our bad habits. Like the marriages in this novel, the intensity of feeling just can't last. There have been a number of 9/11 novels lately, as writers grapple with what that terrible day means to us. This one is essential. Keir Graff
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