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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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The Good
Life by Jay McInerney |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Transformations
In his new novel, The Good
Life, Jay McInerney reprises characters Russell
and Corrine from Brightness Falls,
and pairs them with Luke and Sasha, sets them in
Manhattan after 9/11, and lets the impact of a changed world change their
lives. What seemed to be a good life before 9/11 looked different after that
day’s events, and each character, in one way or another, looks for new
meaning to life. Here’s an excerpt, all of Chapter 6,
pp. 69-73: Ash Wednesday. The
debris—the paper and sooty dust—had surged up the avenues and stopped at Staggering up West
Broadway, coated head to foot in dun ash, he looked like a statue
commemorating some ancient victory, or~ more likely, some noble defeat—a
Confederate general, perhaps. That was her second impression. Her first was that he was at least a day late. Yesterday
morning, and well into the afternoon, thousands had made this same march up
West Broadway, fleeing the tilting plume of smoke, covered in the same gray
ash, slogging through it as the cerulean sky rained paper down on them—a
Black Mass version of the old ticker-tape parades of lower Broadway. It was
as if this solitary figure was re-enacting the retreat of an already-famous
battle. He paused to lean against a Mercedes
coated with the same dust, a yellow respirator dangling from his neck like a
talisman, the creases of his face highlighted by the gray powder. She thought
somehow that for all his dishevelment, he looked familiar, though she
couldn’t say why. His knees
showed through the ripped legs of what until recently had been a pair of
dress slacks. The hard hat looked anomalous, and indeed, as he tilted his
head back, it fell to the curb, exposing a dark tangle of hair, streaked with
the ubiquitous talcy ash. Corrine
approached slowly, afraid she might scare him, a little spooked herself—the
street and sidewalks deserted, as if they were the last two people on earth.
“Are you . . . all right?” Corrine
held out a bottle of Evian; she was just about to give up, when he raised his
hand and reached for it. Both his hands were raw and bloodied, seeping wounds
still wet beneath the dusty grime. After
draining the bottle, he seemed to take note of his surroundings, turning his
head in both directions before finally looking back at Corrine. He stared at
her for an uncomfortably long interval, like someone untrained in the social
graces. “You’re the first person I’ve seen,” he finally said. She
supposed he was in shock or something. She detected the molasses residue of
a southern accent. Seen sounding
almost like sane. “Unless
I’m imagining you.” “No, no,”
she said. “At least I don’t think you are. It’s hard to tell, though. What’s
real, I mean.” “Can you
still smell it here?” he asked. “The
smoke?” Corrine nodded, looking up at the milky plume that arced south by
southwest above the office buildings of Broadway. “Have you been. . . digging?” He wet his
lips and looked back down in the direction from which he’d come. “I was
supposed to meet my friend Guillermo at Windows on the World.” She nodded
encouragingly. “Yesterday?” “Was it
yesterday?” He seemed to be puzzling out the time frame. “Tuesday.”
She realized she’d sidetracked him. This might be the first chance he’d had
to tell his story. For the past twenty-four hours, they’d all been telling
their stories—accounting for their whereabouts and testing their own
reactions in the telling. “The eleventh,” she said. “The
morning of the eleventh. I got down there just before nine. I was supposed to
meet Guillermo at eight, but I left him a message saying I couldn’t make
it.” “You were
lucky,” she said. He nodded
slowly, as if considering an idea that hadn’t occurred to him before. “I
called him late the night before and left a message canceling. Not
canceling—postponing. Until ten. But I never followed up. The thing is, what
happened was, I had a fight with my daughter that night, and I was coming
downtown to meet my accountant at nine—his office was in the She nodded
tentatively, trying to take in the details. Sirens wailed from the direction
of the West Side Highway. A Boston terrier with a white mask dragged its
owner into view around the corner on “When I
got out of the cab,” the ashy man was saying, “people in the plaza were
looking up and pointing. I didn’t really think about it, not until I was in
the elevator of my accountant’s building. Somebody said there’d been an
explosion in the tower. I was in the accountant’s office, reading the Journal, and I suddenly thought, Wait
a minute, maybe Guillermo didn’t get the message. He might not have checked.
I tried to call him on his cell phone, and then Number Seven was evacuated.
I’m calling him over and over as I’m walking down the stairwell from the
twenty-seventh floor. Then I’m on “Next
thing I know, I’m lying on my face in the blackness. I can’t breathe and I
can’t see, and my entire body is aching from the inside out. I don’t know if
I’m blinded or there’s just no light, but finally I make out a yellow glow in
the distance and I start crawling toward it. Then some people pulled me into
the lobby of a building.” “Did you
reach your friend?” “After the
second tower came down, I went back. Because I thought he might be in there
in that monstrous pile and it was my fault. I couldn’t bring myself to leave.
I just stood there on the edge and then, I don’t know, I got in a line,
behind another guy. I just took my place, passing along pieces of the debris.
Someone gave me a hard hat.” He paused and examined the cut on his arm. “Once
in a while, I stopped working to make a call. Then my phone went dead.” “Phone
service is completely screwed up,” Corrine said. “You shouldn’t assume—” “This
morning, there were volunteers down there with phones. I couldn’t reach him.”
He shrugged. “Mailbox full.” He shook his head. “A hundred-something floors
up. If my daughter hadn’t gotten drunk, if my wife hadn’t been. . . If
I hadn’t fought with the both of them. Windows on the World at eight.” “Have you
talked with them? Does your family know you’re safe?” He nodded,
directing a disconcertingly intense gaze upon her. Not the look of a lecher,
more the unself-conscious stare of a child. “You look familiar,” he said. “Corrine,”
she said, holding out her hand. “Luke,” he
said, taking her hand as he glanced back over his shoulder. “Is this really
happening?” “I think
so,” she said. “It’s all kind of unbelievable, though.” “I keep wondering if
I ever actually regained consciousness.” She held his rough hand and kneaded
it cautiously. “You made
it,” she said. “I know
what it is,” he said. “What?” “You look
like Katharine Hepburn.” “What,
spinsterish and flinty?” “In a good
way.” “You’re
delirious.” Actually, she recalled Russell saying the same thing. Centuries
ago. “Do you want to wash up? We’re right up the street. I just came out to
check on a neighbor.” He shook his
head. “I should get home.” “You’ll
have to walk up to Fourteenth. Everything’s blocked off below that. And even
then.. . I don’t know if there
are any cabs.” “Thanks,”
he said. “Please,”
she said, feeling embarrassed in the grip of his gaze. “For what? I didn’t do
anything. Not compared to what you’ve been doing. .. “Actually,
you did,” he said. Corrine
jotted her name and her cell phone number on the back of a receipt from
Odeon. “Do me a favor,” she said, her voice breaking. “Will you just let me know. . . well, that you made it
home safely. Would you do that for me, please?” It was in
many respects a typical encounter on the day after, one of thousands between
stunned and needy strangers, the kind of thing she might have recalled months
or years later when something reminded her of that time or someone asked her
where she’d been that day. In many ways, The Good
Life is a simple story, a love story, and a story about how we hope and
how we deal with loss. McInerney sets this simple
story in the place he knows best, Steve Hopkins,
March 23, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the April 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Good Life.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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