Touch life, sad city

MCINERNEY TAKES ON POST-9/11 N.Y.C.With his new novel, "The Good Life" (Knopf, $25), Jay McInerney has come full circle. Twenty-one years ago, he debuted with "Bright Lights, Big City," the consummate New York coming-of-age novel - complete with the Twin Towers and Odeon on the book's cover.

"The Good Life" sees that coming-of-age generation at midlife, as two well-to-do families grapple with the days following Sept. 11. McInerney spoke to us at a wine bar on lower Fifth Avenue, where he seemed to know most of the patrons and staff. He had a glass of Chablis, I had water - which seemed to disappoint him.

"The Good Life" is your most serious and moving book. Do you feel that way about it?

If I didn't need the money, I wouldn't have turned it in. It was so hard to write that it really wore me out. I just really didn't think it was any good. I had to throw away my old bag of tricks, the easy social satire and the wordplay and the drawing-room humor that I've relied on to seduce my readers. I didn't feel like I could do that in this book. I just thought the book was grim.

There's a fine line between gravity and grimness. And this book has to be serious, given the subject matter. How did it come about?

I was working on a couple of ideas for novels when 9/11 happened - one began with a terrorist attack on a movie premiere - and I had to throw out what I was working on. For about six months I didn't write anything. It seemed like fiction was frivolous. I didn't know how I could and how I could not write about this, as someone who writes about New York. So I just worked in a soup kitchen.

It's a 9/11 book, but you omit the actual day.

This book isn't about 9/11 so much as about that whole period which was extraordinary, those two or three months of everyone re-evaluating our lives. It was genuine, there was nothing quite like it and in some ways we'll never be that alive again. I wanted to capture that mood. Too bad that six months later we were back to caring what Britney Spears thought.

There's still a lot of humor in the book, especially the similarities between mobsters and society ladies and the descriptions of an idle writer's workday.

For two years when I was writing my seventh novel, those were my days: Go to the bookstore, read the paper, [mess around]. You know - it's amazing how you can fill up a day: go to the dry cleaners, have lunch, turn on the news.

But you're always writing reviews and articles: You championed Benjamin Kunkel's book, wrote the script to Angelina Jolie's "Gia" and made Chloe Sevigny a star in the New Yorker.

I didn't start this book until 2002 and my last book came in 1999. There was a long time there when I was flailing and not doing what I was supposed to be doing, novel-wise. But yes, at the same time I've written this column for House and Garden every month for 10 years, so it's not as if I was completely unemployed.

How many drafts do you write?

I always write three drafts, but the three drafts of this are the most dissimilar I have ever written. There was no love story when I first wrote this and now it's all a love story. I really envy those people who can outline a novel and know what they're doing, like Bret Ellis and like Fitzgerald. It would have come out three years ago if I knew what I was doing.

I wouldn't have thought you worked quite so hard.

I always associate grace and inspiration with good work and until recently I laughed at the notion of writer's block. Another reason: With "Bright Lights, Big City," I didn't dash it off one night when I was high, but it was closer to that than to this book. I wrote "Bright Lights" in six weeks, and this one took 3 1/2 years. I thought writing was going to get easier, but it may be the opposite.

You can't really be writing novels for the money.

How many people with trust funds have written good novels? If you're not broke, why bother writing? I spent three years on this book. I have stylish destitution.

Ten years ago, I saw George Plimpton introduce you with much praise at a reading at Limbo.

I think he was lying through his teeth. I miss George a lot. He discovered me in a sense. It wasn't like discovering radium or anything, but it meant a lot to me.

The media portrayed you, Bret Ellis and Tama Janowitz as flashes in the pan, but you're all still writing 20 years later.

Tama I haven't kept up with, but I had dinner with Bret every Friday until he left town. I miss him. And I got to be a character in his new book "Lunar Park," which reads like 1989 all over again. When I first read it I sort of wanted to kill him, but it's so funny.

Both you and Bret Ellis bring some measure of glamour to writing, which is often populated by the earnest and dreary.

And I've been severely punished for it. My heroes were Fitzgerald and Mailer and Hemingway, and to me it was sexy and fun to be a writer. It's tragic that literature should be the province of tweedy nerds. It's exciting to me. Literature needs infusions of energy and glamour in order to keep it remotely connected to the popular culture.

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