|
In the 20 years since Jay McInerney was hailed as the wunderkind of American fiction for Bright Lights, Big City he has matured into a great novelist. His latest book, The Good Life (Bloomsbury, £17.99) will do nothing to tarnish that reputation. His subject matter isn't the most edgy (he sticks to the dazzling - and dazzled - world of New York socialites, Wall Street tough guys, and media chatteratti that he knows so well) and his style isn't the most flashy, but it is cool, relaxed and utterly achieved.
His setting being Manhattan, and his project being to anatomise the zeitgeist, there's only one moment McInerney could choose to kick-start the action: 9/11. He's not the first and he won't be the last American writer to worry away at this cataclysm. But there's nothing cheap about his manipulation of the event's emotions.
|
 |
|
 |
 |
|
|
Nobody dissects the Big Apple quite like Jay McInerney, says tim auld
|
|
|
|
He tells the story of a middle-aged man and woman, both married, both with children, both dissatisfied, who meet in the wreckage, fall in love working the night shift in a soup kitchen at Ground Zero, and resolve to leave their old lives behind.
It's a cliche, of course, but the sympathy, humour and tenderness with which McInerney teases out their lives, and the hopes and fears of their children, lifts the narrative to a different level.
If this all sounds rather depressing, fear not. There are some show-stopping scenes made for the movie - like the mistress who greets a wife with the words: "So this is Corinne, who doesn't give blowjobs" - and these keep the narrative crackling while the drizzle of mid-life crisis descends. 
FIRST
POSTED MARCH 14, 2006
More fiction: Disobedience
|
