desperation of people who feel caught in lifestyles that do not reflect who they really are or what they want as they settle into the kind of middle age that they had never imagined.

In a masterful stroke, McInerney’s narrative entirely skips the day of September 11. So much has been written about that day, and about the reaction of those who witnessed the terrorist attacks firsthand, that it would be difficult for a novelist to add anything new to the discussion. The story picks up again on the morning of the twelfth, with the meeting of Luke McGavock and Corrine Calloway. Luke, having found himself near the collapsed World Trade Center, spent the previous day digging through the rubble with others in the hope of finding survivors. As he staggers uptown toward his home the next day, he meets Corrine on the street. She offers him bottled water, and he feels compelled to tell her his story. The bulk of the novel from this point on follows these two characters as they try to work through their sense of futility and survivor’s guilt by volunteering in a hastily established soup kitchen near the wreckage, and their new friendship becomes increasingly eroticized.

In the emotionally charged atmosphere of post-September 11 Manhattan, this romantic attraction almost inevitably grows into a full-fledged affair. Intermingled with this tenuous romance are musings about spouses, children, parents, and friends as well as half-formed reflections on the fate of New York’s people and American culture in general. Perhaps the strongest feature of the novel is the way in which the author captures the striking details of life in this particular time and place, where people once again take up long-discarded smoking and drinking habits and where a prescription for the anthrax-fighting drug Cipro can be considered a “sweet” dinner party favor.

As in other McInerney novels, New York City must itself be considered a character in The Good Life. The novel is as much about how New York will recover from the terrorist attacks as it is about the various ethical and personal choices of individual characters. References to vacation homes in Long Island’s Hamptons and well-known Manhattan restaurants and nightspots abound. Famous people hover about the periphery of the novel, as when readers learn that writer Salman Rushdie was meant to be a guest at the Calloways’ dinner party, though he declined at the last minute. Some critics are annoyed by McInerney’s relentless name-dropping, which extends to brand names, street addresses, and hip cultural references. Indeed, those who do not share McInerney’s obsession with the minutiae of New York society might not always find it easy to spot when such allusions are being made, let alone what exactly they imply about the characters. The author also seems to delight in pointing out how even longtime New Yorkers can be ignorant of the history and culture of their city.

The Good Life raises a number of ethical dilemmas that swirl around Luke and Corrine’s doomed affair. The two characters discover (perhaps a bit too conveniently, as it at least partially mitigates the blame for their own infidelities) that each of their spouses had been having affairs well before September 11. Both also encounter serious problems involving their children: Luke’s daughter Ashley turns out to have a drug addiction, while Corrine fears that her sister Hilary has come to take her twin son and daughter away (as Hilary is, in fact, their biological mother). Both Luke and Corrine also worry that their work in the soup kitchen is somehow less genuine, and therefore less valuable, because their motives for doing it combine a charitable impulse with a desire to spend time with each other. Each of these complications seems to ask, but not answer, another difficult question: What does one owe a dishonest spouse? What is best for the children, and how much of their own happiness should parents be ready to sacrifice in order to secure the happiness of their kids? What are charity and altruism, and are motives as important as actions? Perhaps the largest unanswered question involves the extent to which the old rules apply in a world where everything seems to have been changed by one day’s senseless violence.

Critical reaction to The Good Life was mixed. While McInerney’s name assured that the book would be seriously considered, some critics felt that the author’s earlier works had already sufficiently covered the terrain of angst-ridden relationships among New York’s more glamorous denizens. Indeed, the love story between Corrine and Luke is fairly conventional novelistic fare, spiced with fairly conventional anxieties about middle age and marriage. The prose, while generally vivid and descriptively rich, does occasionally lapse into the clichéd and stilted, especially in some of the longer passages of dialogue. A number of critics noted, as they did with McInerney’s previous works, that it can be hard to sympathize with his self-absorbed, privileged characters.

Still, some readers found the book a balm after the tragic events that shook not only the city of New York but also the entire United States and the world. The novel has been acknowledged as a worthy attempt to come to grips with what is left after September 11, 2001, and how New Yorkers, and by analogy the rest of the world’s residents, might try to live better lives afterward. Luke and Corrine try to separate their illicit relationship from their everyday lives by maintaining “the illusion that . . . beyond the barricades was a world apart.” Part of the novel’s point, however, is that no such separation is possible. What happens in one part of one’s life must inevitably affect the other parts, just as an isolated terrorist attack will change the political shape of the world.

The title phrase, “the good life,” is repeated several times during the course of the novel, always in reference to fairly conventional notions of money and a life of personal ease. In each mention, though, this is a distancing device, a chance for the characters to consider whether or not the existence described in these materialistic terms is really “the good life.” Unsurprisingly perhaps, in each case the implied answer is a resounding no. The mass of less successful men and women who lack the opportunities of the Calloways or McGavocks might not be so quick to dismiss these conventional markers of happiness or to feel deeply sorry for those who have but do not appreciate them. For McInerney and his characters, it is clear that a truly good life would be built on something other than money and social status; it would rest on such intangibles as honesty, work of lasting value, and solid human relationships.