FICTION: Romantic tale doesn't fare well in event's shadow

05:09 PM CST on Sunday, February 5, 2006

By JOSEPH MILAZZO / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

It is nothing if not unfair to criticize a creative work for what it is not. Yet Jay McInerney's latest book almost cannot help but inspire a less-than-cordial reception. The Good Life is, like any especially polished soap opera, admirably grandiose. However, as an example of literary fiction that attempts to encompass recent history, as well as contemporary mores, it is vacuous indeed.

At the center of the novel are Corrine Calloway (a character last encountered in Brightness Falls) and Luke McGavock. Both are barely middle-aged. Both have repugnant spouses and angelic, scarred children. And both are quintessential New Yorkers who are simultaneously displaced rural Americans who still haven't forgotten the delights of the unassuming peanut butter and jelly sandwich. So both are beautiful – physically, metaphysically and as representatives of our nation's privileged classes.

Mr. McInerney's hook is that these fates collide on the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001. Luke, "staggering up Broadway ... covered in dun ash," emerges from the debris of the World Trade Center only to encounter Corrine, who treats him to a random act of kindness involving a bottle of Evian. Soon these two individuals find each other, as well as a new sense of purpose in life, in volunteering at a lower Manhattan relief station. Here they pass cups of coffee to exhausted police officers and nurture a pure if illicit love the reader knows is meant to be foiled.

All the familiar and unapologetically pulpy McInerney tropes are present in The Good Life: the cultural name-dropping, the parties, the glitzy drugs, the especially cruel infidelities and the highly romanticized carnality. And while Mr. McInerney is as adept as John O'Hara at hard-boiled depictions of that special marital misery that belongs to movers and shakers, he indulges this talent far too often. Injury compounds injury, and the narrative bogs down in glib brooding.

Worse, Mr. McInerney never bothers to probe what role introspection might play with respect to an event as staggeringly complex as the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Clearly, the author wants to propel his characters through some transfiguring experience. Unfortunately, no action in the novel, no matter how tawdry, justifies as much. Too little occurs. Our hero and heroine are allowed to have far too much "happen to" them.

The Good Life's failure is that it neither documents nor imagines a reality remade by 9/11. And because the relationships Mr. McInerney wishes us to believe are also expressions of this world, ultimately the reader cannot but read "sentimentality" where the author has writ "passion" and "truth" larger than life.

In fact, the reader who makes it all the way to the yearning, Great Gatsby-manqué final pages of the The Good Life may well be reminded of a line from the Tony Bennett hit that shares a name with this novel: "so be honest with yourself / don't try to fake romance."

Freelance writer Joseph Milazzo lives in Dallas.

Jay McInerney (Knopf, $25)