Bad Apple

Profile subject: Author Jay McInerney. Photo Steve Carty.

I was weaned on fairytales of New York. First came Eloise, the picture book about the brat who wreaks havoc at the Plaza Hotel; then it was The Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, in which two kids from drab suburban Connecticut run away to Manhattan, hiding out at the Metropolitan Museum. Later came The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Together, these books — supplemented by umpteen movies – glamorized the metropolis that natives refer to as The City.

Jay McInerney’s first novel, Bright Lights, Big City (1984), further enhanced New York’s mystique, though in a perverse way: by portraying it as a sin capital. In it, a young man spends his days working as a fact-checker at a New Yorker-like magazine and his evenings barhopping, bedding comely models and binging on cocaine. Written in the second person, it begins spectacularly: “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. … You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder.” Bright Lights captured the decadent 1980s zeitgeist, transforming McInerney into a generational spokesman and the latest purveyor of New York’s stories.

Courtesy Knopf Canada.

Now 51, McInerney has since written six novels (all but one of them set in Gotham). His latest, The Good Life, is his first piece of fiction in eight years, and is among the first major 9/11 novels to be released by an important New York writer. A direct literary descendant of F. Scott (“the rich are different”) Fitzgerald, McInerney continues to pay attention to those who have money, looks, intelligence and/or celebrity; losers need not apply for a place in his fiction.

Like his characters, McInerney has enjoyed the fruits of making it in the city that never sleeps: a succession of relationships, including three marriages to gorgeous, well-connected women (he’s currently dating a Hearst); copious drugs (which he says he quit in his late 40s); fine wine (which he regularly writes about for House and Garden magazine); friendships with the famous; and invites to A-list parties.

During a recent interview in Toronto, the writer was wearing a striped shirt under a blue blazer: as the white suit is to Tom Wolfe, so the blazer is to McInerney. He responded to questions gingerly, clear evidence of an interviewee who's been burned by the media many times.

When asked about a party held at the tony 21 Club in 2004 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his first novel, McInerney sounds pained. “You know, I’m no longer the same guy who wrote Bright Lights, Big City, and to be always written about as such is a little tedious. That party was a way of putting that book behind me, although I guess I never will.”

Fair enough. McInerney easily bested his first book with his third, Brightness Falls (1992), among the finest novels of the past two decades. The Good Life chronicles the lives of two couples — Russell and Corrine Calloway and Sasha and Luke McGavock — in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001.

“I was impressed with what John Updike did with his Rabbit series, taking the same characters through the '60s, '70s and '80s,” McInerney comments. “And the main couple in Brightness and The Good Life, Russell and Corrine Calloway, are my most deeply drawn characters. We all have some apparently flawless couple in our lives. Of course, nobody knows what goes on behind closed doors.” Having grown up on a diet of books glamorizing the city, I was struck by how fundamentally blah The Good Life makes New York seem. Not even 9/11 can fully jolt it out of its lethargy. Although McInerney remains bullish on his adopted hometown (he’s originally from Connecticut), his writing has long charted New York’s decline. In Brightness Falls, Corrine Calloway returns to New York after a summer holiday and comments flatly, “The city seemed … to have lost its poetry.”

In McInerney’s latest book, the city has lost more than that. It's lost its soul.

In The Good Life, Sasha McGavock, the beautiful socialite wife of a retired financier, spends her time doing coke at $10,000-a-seat charity benefits and caring deeply what table she rates at 21 Club. She’s having an affair with a fat, corrupt businessman (who rose to the top in the go-go 1980s) and inadvertently driving her teenaged daughter to drugs. Sept. 11 hardly seems to register with Sasha. 

Indeed, no one in the book pays any attention to the global issues that led to the destruction of the twin towers. “I didn't want this to be a book about terrorism or politics,” McInerney says. “I wanted it to be about a community’s reaction to a communal tragedy.” McInerney’s New York has never been cosmopolitan. His characters are wealthy, usually white Americans, preoccupied with acquiring and spending money. Even in the wake of Sept. 11, they don't think globally. They seem fundamentally provincial in their outlook.

The best lives in The Good Life are enacted far from New York. Sasha’s mother-in-law teaches people with disabilities to ride horses at a farm in Tennessee; compared to her nasty, snobbish daughter-in-law, she is warm and down to earth. The contrasts McInerney draws between the mother- and daughter-in-law, and between the country and the city, are very ’80s, coming down to a debate between callow, conspicuous consumption and grounded, noble altruism.

At the centre of the book is an affair between Corinne, now a mother, and Luke, the former financial kingpin. In the wake of 9/11, they end up working together at a soup kitchen feeding volunteers near Ground Zero (as McInerney himself did), where they learn key lessons about life and each other, but seem to make little emotional progress.

“New York has always been about reinvention,” McInerney says, making reference to Jay Gatsby. “I think that’s what these characters are doing.” To my mind, that's exactly what they can’t find the energy to do. They move to the brink of starting fresh, then pull back. When asked whether his characters are trapped in the ’80s, McInerney seems to take the question personally: “I don't think they’re stuck at all. I think they're moving ahead with their lives.” His offence is not surprising, since he, too, has sought to refashion his party-boy image, attempting to assume the gravitas of a literary lion. Once the inspiration for fresh ideas, the city McInerney depicts at the outset of The Good Life has become stale and insular, doing the same party drugs it did in the ’80s, wearing the same designers to the same outrageously expensive charity events, eating in the same restaurants, engaged in the same tired debates. McInerney’s New York has become the one thing that never seemed possible in its long tumultuous history: a bore, looking backward rather than forward. Although Sept. 11 changes some of McInerney’s characters, they soon revert to their old routines.

New York's run as a fairytale city, and a magnet for a certain type of youth, is ending. It seems McInerney himself can’t — or won’t — see the moral of his own stories. When his son from his third marriage (who lives in Tennessee) periodically asks McInerney if he'll leave New York, the author always responds, “Not yet.”

“We’re a self-selecting crew, we Manhattanites,” says McInerney. “I still like Updike’s remark: that real New Yorkers feel that anyone living anywhere else must, in some sense, be kidding.”

Alec Scott writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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