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The vanished icons loom from the cover of Jay McInerney's famous first novel. You didn't really notice them when "Bright Lights, Big City" came out in 1984. You were 22 years younger, perhaps, like the book's narrator, preoccupied with sex, vodka, Bolivian marching powder and the Talking Heads. The slim novel follows the trail of a young man whose life rages out of control, and the World Trade Center towers immediately identify the setting for his alternately hilarious and heartbreaking adventures.
The towers are back - faintly - on the dust jacket of McInerney's new novel, but history has altered their impact from geographic locator to potent symbol of unspeakable tragedy. The ironically titled "The Good Life" (Knopf, $25) explores the aftermath of Sept. 11 on two New York families, in particular on two people, married but not to each other, who start an affair literally amid the ashes.
Not surprisingly, delving into Sept. 11 felt impossible to McInerney. Struggling before the attacks with an imposing bout of self-doubt and writer's block, he wasn't sure he'd ever write fiction again.
"Once I got past that feeling it seemed important to me to chronicle that moment. It was an extraordinary moment, and it was already fading six months later," he says from his apartment in Greenwich Village. "The three months I write about really were the best of times and the worst of times. People here in New York were experiencing heightened awareness, a wartime mentality. People were trying to be their best selves."
And, yes, their worst selves, too: "People were also drinking too much, having sex with everybody who came along. ... We thought, `What do I really want to do with the rest of my life, given that it might end at any moment?'"
Thrice-divorced and the father of 11-year-old twins, McInerney has been an enthusiastic archivist of the gaudy excess of metropolitan culture and behavior, especially as it resonates within the upwardly mobile, high-society, hey-we-hang-out-with-models set. His wildly funny "Story of My Life," which followed the exploits of a party girl, reinforced the image of Manhattan as a playground for wealthy young hedonists. "Brightness Falls," set against the stock market crash of 1987, explores what happens to spendthrift yuppies when the bubble bursts. "Model Behavior," a short-fiction collection, gently satirizes the cult of celebrity in the '90s.
All of these scenarios McInerney knew well, given his reputation as a hitchhiker in the fast lane, an image that clings despite the rather startling fact of his 50th birthday last year. He says he doesn't go out "that" much these days.
"I certainly hope that I've outgrown it," he says of this image. "There's a sense I'm stuck in the late '80s with a drink in one hand and a model on my arm. That was then. I've changed and grown ... There's a way in which having that persona can be a bit of a handicap as you grow older. There's always been a certain amount of critical animus that had to do with the fact I had succeeded early, had too much too fast and was having too much fun."
In fact, says McInerney's lit-brat-pack pal Bret Easton Ellis, sometimes "Jay believes he's a badder boy than he is. He's really not. He's really kind of a gentle, nice guy. He's a nerd! He also sees himself as an outsider, and that gives his writing a tenderness and longing I like. His novels are often about that, a guy on the outside waiting to be let in."
McInerney's romance with New York - "He loves the city and everyone in it; he was always excited by it in a wide-eyed way," Ellis says - is far from over.
"I feel more a part of it than ever," McInerney says. "When I came here I thought, `This is where I belong.' ... I tried to leave the city after 9/11. I got divorced before 9/11, and my wife and kids were in Tennessee, so I went back and forth a lot. I thought I should go back and get back together with my ex-wife and live in a sensible place like Nashville. I tried. It didn't quite take. But they moved back here, which is great.
"I like it when someone in the book says, `I'd rather die in the city than survive in the suburbs.' Glib as that sounds it reflects how I feel."
In "The Good Life," McInerney resurrects his "Brightness Falls" protagonists, Corinne and Russell Calloway, who must now cope with middle age in the wake of catastrophe. "I'm an admirer of Updike's "Rabbit" books, and Roth has revived some of his characters over time," McInerney says. "It was always the plan. It just took me longer than I first thought it would. I was trying to write a kind of sequel when the planes hit, and that changed the book."
Like most New Yorkers, McInerney has a Sept. 11 story.
"I was looking out my window when the first plane hit. My shade was broken, and I was trying to get the chain back on its track. The World Trade Center was in my peripheral vision. I saw a flash of light. I didn't know what I had seen. ... I didn't see anything the rest of the world didn't see. But it was so close."
Numb with shock and the need to do "something" - much like Corinne in the novel - McInerney spent several weeks volunteering at a soup kitchen, handing out drinks and sandwiches to crews working in the smoking rubble. He was so staggered by his first look at Ground Zero that he transferred his awe to Corinne. "Everyone says it's so small when they see it on TV," she tells her would-be lover Luke, who has lost a friend there. "Actually it's huge. It's the biggest thing I've ever seen."
Luke and Corinne worry about issues vital to almost anyone in their 40s: children, growing apart from one's spouse, careers, life after retirement. Critics note that "The Good Life" might be McInerney's most grown-up book, and he doesn't disagree.
"My earlier writing had a bad-boy sensibility, and inevitably that becomes more difficult to sustain as you get older. I had to make the transition to writing about midlife and characters who have to acknowledge they're not 25 anymore."
He also wanted to explore the fact that while terrible events altered it, New York has bounced back. "At our age," one "Good Life" character says, "fresh starts are harder to come by. History accumulates."
And yet life goes on. Tourists still flock, and New Yorkers pack the best restaurants, bars and theaters. Brashness is back. "You could see that as a bad thing, or you could say it's great," McInerney says. "We're resilient. But we never hear sirens or gunshots and ignore them the way we used to. We look at each other in elevators more, partly because of that sense that these might be the last people we see."
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(c) 2006, The Miami Herald. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
