How To Deal: The Ones Left Behind On 9/11

In the wake of Sept. 11, what does one—what ought one—do next?

This is the question Jay McInerney addresses in his novel, “The Good Life.” The answer he seeks—the novel’s perplexing moral core—lies at the end of an exploration of individual human responses to the tragedy that shattered thousands of lives and transformed a nation.

Examining the lasting consequences of the terrorist attacks through the lenses of love, family, and deception, McInerney paints a powerful and harrowing portrait of an afterlife—the post-9/11 world of the survivors.

“The Good Life” is a chronicle of the worlds of two very different families that are surreptitiously, but inextricably, intertwined in the aftermath of disaster.

Corrine and Russell Calloway live in TriBeCa, battling their precarious pecuniary situation and struggling to preserve a fragile marriage marred by suspicion and past infidelity. And when Corrine’s glamorous and prodigal younger sister returns from her latest escapade, her destabilizing presence threatens to expose a secret that Corrine has carefully hidden from her beloved twins for six years.

Meanwhile, on the Upper East Side, wealthy Luke McGavock has abandoned his 20-year stint as an investment banker in an effort to satisfy a new (and this time real) passion: writing a book about samurai film. Unfortunately, the prospects of literary success are about as auspicious as those of his disintegrating home life.

Luke’s wife Sasha, a glittering socialite of ageless beauty, immerses herself in the “benefit scene”—indiscriminately partaking in drugs, affairs, and social soirées—and his wayward teenage daughter is in imminent danger of following irredeemably in her mother’s footsteps.

When Corrine first comes upon Luke, then a dazed and disoriented stranger stumbling up West Broadway, it is a day after the Sept. 11 disaster—the first day in what they both come to recognize as an “entirely new calendar.” Begrimed and bloodied, a guilt-wracked Luke is desperately searching for the friend he was to meet that fatal morning when he is effectively saved by the “angelic apparition…whom, in his delirium, he’d briefly and wishfully imagined as the last woman on earth—or the first.”

This chance encounter provides the foundation for sustained spiritual support in the wake of tremendous devastation. However, as Corrine and Luke’s relationship gradually extends beyond the bounds of friendship and into the realm of romance, familial responsibilities surge to the forefront and love trespasses on the limits of traditional morality.

Their volunteer work at the Bowling Green, a temporary soup kitchen for rescue workers, becomes a secret pleasure for both. The problem, as Luke articulates, is whether the “good he was doing downtown was morally canceled out by the pleasure he derived from being there.”

The protagonists’ predicament, then, lies in the difficulty of reconciling perceived moral obligations with all-consuming emotional desire. This dilemma arises out of Luke and Corrine’s inability to satisfy the disparate claims exerted on them by their pre-9/11 and post-9/11 lives, as well as out of their unwilling yet inevitable subjection to a “past [that] always catches up with [them] in the end.”

The novel suffers from several less-than-perfect attempts at recreating the evocative magic of Proust’s madeleine—employing peanut butter and jelly instead to achieve the “mnemonic power of a simple sandwich”—and it somewhat overeagerly propounds a pastoral ideal as the key to “the good life.”

Notwithstanding these shortcomings, the book all in all is a worthwhile read. McInerney succeeds in crafting a moving and insightful narrative about loss and redemption and the ties of love that ultimately bind us together, for better or worse.

—Staff writer Calina A. Ciobanu can be reached at ciobanu@fas.harvard.edu.

The Good Life
By Jay McInerney
Knopf
Out Now