Reviews for The Good Life

The average rating for The Good Life based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-03-30 00:00:00 Douglas Lalonde All the low 'starred' reviews of this novel that feature first on Goodreads have agitated me to the point that I cannot properly formulate my own full review. I can tell you this: I read this novel and felt achingly sad when it ended, not for the story's end but because I'd finished the novel. I roamed the house unable to settle with a new novel and finally gave up. Picked up The Good Life again and started to re-read it. Yes, I read the book, and then read it again, straight away! I think that might tell you how much I enjoyed the book, loved the characters and the setting and lives McInerney constructed for them. James Frey (whose novel, Bright Shiny Morning, I did not like) says about The Good Life: "People wonder what kind of writer F Scott Fitzgerald might have been had he lived. McInerney, his closest successor, is starting to show us… […] A very subtle, incredibly insightful, heartbreaking story about life in New York." Keir Graff of Booklist says " McInerney is a master at finding truths we barely even admit to ourselves: without moralising, he explores the ways we use disaster to our own emotional ends, and above all, whether we're really capable of change. A day that most people said would change us forever seems now to have provided only vacation from our bad habits… There have been a number of 9/11 novels lately, as writers grapple with what that terrible day means to us. This one is essential." Remember Kier Graff's last sentence "This one is essential'. Do not be swayed by the 2★ and 1★ reviews. I recommend you read this novel. 5★

Review # 2 was written on 2015-02-02 00:00:00 Kesha Skaggs Like his obvious influence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jay McInerney has always been an astute social chronicler. His previous novels, one about the coke-filled club scene of the early 80s, for example, and another about the post-boom stock market mini-crash, seem almost trivial next to the loaded setting of The Good Life: the day before and the months after September 11, 2001. The story centres on two contrasting couples, familiar from some of McInerney's earlier fiction. Gracefully aging hipsters Corrine and Russell Calloway are raising their twin kids in TriBeCa, while socialites Luke and Sasha McGavock barely see their troubled teenager daughter in their Upper East Side co-op. When Corrine and Luke, who have both taken themselves out of the rat race to pursue more meaningful work, meet in the debris-filled aftermath of the attacks and consequently start working in a relief-effort soup kitchen, they find an emotional bond that's lacking at home. What to do? Like John Cheever, quoted in one of the book's epigraphs, McInerney dissects encroaching middle age and marital infidelity with special care. He brings a whiff of glamour to adultery, but he knows that it exacts a price. His people have made choices and, when faced with catastrophe, must examine whether they're the right ones. Written in lyrical, almost elegiac prose, the book begins well, covers the WTC disasters with understated tact and also delivers some rich satire about Manhattan's pretty people. The denouement is exquisite. But there's something missing at the book's heart. McInerney is a good satirist, but I'm not sure he's a fine portraitist. We know where his characters went to school, what they wear and who they know, but they never jump off the page. This is fine for a pop novel like Bright Lights, Big City, but here he's trying for something more and doesn't quite succeed. Originally published in NOW Magazine: