The Calloways go thataway
The Good Life
By Jay McInerney
Knopf
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Reviewed by Giles Blunt
Jay McInerney has written several excellent novels, including Bright Lights, Big City, Story of My Life and, most notably, his 1992 masterpiece, Brightness Falls.
That book introduced Russell and Corrine Calloway, the most envied couple of their class at Brown. Russell is a hotshot editor, and Corrine a disaffected stockbroker with a heart of gold. Russell launches a leveraged buyout of his publishing company, using the couple’s savings and the Satanic expertise of a corporate raider. The stock market crashes, costing Russell his takeover bid and, worse, Corrine, when she finds out about a barely consummated affair. The novel ends with the golden couple on separate coasts, uncertain they’ll ever get back together.
With The Good Life, the author has brought Russell and Corrine back. It’s now September, 2001, and the Calloways have long been reconciled. Russell has re-established himself in publishing, while Corrine has been a fervent stay-at-home mom in their TriBeCa loft.
McInerney eloquently conveys the sense of time passed and passing. On an old friend, formerly a prodigious drinker: “It was kind of sad, the extinction of that bright genie that came out after [he] had had a few…. The lights grew dimmer as they hit their forties and some of the lights had been extinguished altogether.” And on the diminution of the couple’s sex life: “The white sheet between them like a blank page she couldn’t find the words to fill.”
Russell was the protagonist of the earlier book, but in The Good Life, it is Corrine who takes centre stage. Now that the kids are off to school, she is wondering what to do with her life. Russell is a good father, but far from romantic. He’s more interested in food and wine than Corrine, and he retains a teenager’s desperation to be trendy (he must have not just the right wine, but the right cookware, and Calphalon need not apply). Corrine knows she is living the good life of the title and yet she’s yearning for…something.
That something staggers out of the ashes of September 11. Luke McGavock is a rich, handsome investment banker who, like Corrine, is at a crossroads. At the moment she meets him, he is bleeding and covered in ash, having been digging bare-handed through the ruins of the towers.
Corrine is inspired by Luke’s Good Samaritan example to help out at a makeshift soup kitchen that is feeding the army of rescue workers. So here they are, two good-looking former financial types, surrounded by death and destruction, working strange hours in stranger conditions, and they quickly develop a passion for each other. Now, they must figure out what to do with it: is the good life over for them, or just beginning?
Much of the story is related in McInerney’s trademark ironic tone, but he can roll out a powerful emotional scene when he wants to. One of the most telling episodes occurs in the past. Corinne, unable to conceive children herself, enlists the aid of her younger sister to provide the required ovaries. Over the course of doctor visits, injections, and wildly careening hormones, tempers wear thin and the two women have a marvellously rendered blow-up. There is also a horrifying moment when an unstable minx corners Corinne at a party with undeniable proof of her husband’s infidelity, a pitch-perfect nightmare of sexual humiliation. These scenes are so good that one wishes there were more.
The Good Life might have been better served by new characters rather than Corrine and Russell. We’ve already seen these two being unfaithful in Brightness Falls, we’ve already seen their marriage on the rocks; in the parlance of the story conference, we’ve hit those beats before. Were it not for the addition of 9/11, there would be no reason to tell this story about this couple.
Unfortunately, the choice of “Ground Zero” as an arena for a love affair has the consequence of trivializing the tragedy. Corinne is right there amid the smoke and ash but she is focused almost entirely on Luke. If this were played à la Spalding Grey (Why is this happening to me!?), it might work as satire, but it isn’t and doesn’t. And, given the characters’ history, the suggestion that the affair is caused by 9/11 is unconvincing.
Love stories can certainly be set against war zones without this trivializing effect. Farewell to Arms and The End of the Affair are two flawless examples. But in the first, the affair is limned as an idyll, an escape from the war, and in the second, the hero’s monomania is precisely the point.
The Good Life may not be flawless, but it’s rich with engaging narration, telling observations, and dialogue conveyed in virtuoso Manhattanese. Although readers may occasionally be irritated by his obsession with affluent preppies, McInerney remains one of the most incisive commentators on our time, and one always looks forward to whatever he has to say next.
This review appeared in The Globe and Mail on Saturday, February 4, 2006.
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