‘The Good Life’ exhilarating but disappointing

“The Good Life”

by Jay McInerney (Alfred A. Knopf 336 pages, $25)

Ever since his blockbuster debut with “Bright Lights, Big City” in 1984, Jay McInerney has had an unsettled relationship with the rich, distracted New Yorkers who populate his novels.

He has cataloged their self-indulgent behavior with a great deal of flair and perhaps too much affection, never managing to satirize them adequately even when satire was clearly his goal. This soft spot for his characters is McInerney’s most attractive feature as a novelist, as well as his greatest limitation.

It reaches a kind of apex in his latest book, “The Good Life,” which imagines what might happen to several members of Manhattan cafe society during the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001.

One could call it a tale of two addresses: first, the Tribeca loft where Russell and Corrine Calloway live with their 6-year-old twins; and second, the Upper East Side townhouse occupied by Luke and Sasha McGavock and their 14-year-old daughter.

The Calloways, who were also the protagonists of McInerney’s 1992 novel, “Brightness Falls,” are the very model of the bourgeois-bohemian couple, with their summer house in Sagaponack and their faux-casual dinner parties, accessorized with pink Peruvian salt and the trendiest wines. Russell works in publishing, and Corrine is dabbling with a screenplay, and if their finances do not precisely measure up to their expensive tastes, neither of them seems terribly worried about it.

The McGavocks live in somewhat more rarefied air. Luke recently quit his job as a financier, but not before stockpiling an impressive fortune. His wife Sasha is a chilly queen of the charity balls, Botoxed and starved to perfection, a bit too fond of her Chardonnay and a bit too flirty with another prominent megamillionaire.

Husband and wife are also too preoccupied with themselves to notice the mounting troubles of their daughter, Ashley, who has been experimenting with drugs and sex in order to negotiate the competitive social world of her elite private school.

When the morning of Sept. 11 explodes across the consciousness of the Calloways and the McGavocks, McInerney proceeds to imagine how the event will change these characters, if at all. The day after the attacks, a deeply shaken Corrine works the midnight shift at a soup kitchen near Ground Zero, making sandwiches for the rescue workers. There she meets Luke, who narrowly had escaped death by postponing a breakfast meeting at Windows on the World and who also feels compelled to volunteer at the site.

During their nocturnal shifts over the weeks that follow, Corrine and Luke, who have each lost a close friend in the fallen towers, nurture their mutual consolation into a romance. In the meantime, Corrine learns of a sleazy affair between Russell and his ex-assistant, Luke’s suspicions about Sasha’s infidelity crystallize into certainty, and Ashley is sent to a rehab center after attempting a drug overdose.

In another novelist’s hands – Tom Wolfe’s, say, or Kurt Andersen’s – Luke and Corrine would be ridiculed mercilessly as hopeless twits. McInerney, however, is an entirely different kind of author, every bit as romantic as his characters.

His elegantly expressed compassion for these people lifts parts of “The Good Life” toward real literary authority. At other times it leads to some atrociously sentimental writing – most notably during the love scenes between Luke and Corrine, whose cooings have the stale mawkishness of soap-opera dialogue.

Offering exhilaration and disappointment in equal measure, “The Good Life” is a glittering but badly flawed entertainment.