Bitch, Read #5: The Good Life

Though I have decided I am thoroughly not ready to watch a 9/11 themed film (sorry, Oliver), I have decided that 5 years (can you believe it's been five years!) is far removed enough from the calamity to embark upon an exploration of some 9/11 themed literature. The first on my list? Jay McInerny's The Good Life.

Yes, the author of Bright Lights, Big City is back with a book that starts on the eve of the day that changed the world. Partly a peek into the lives of Manhattan's wealthiest and not quite wealthiest, partly a love in the time of war story, McInerny weaves a story as complex as the post-9/11 New Yorkers who inhabit that.

Corrinne and Luke each find themselves vastly underoccupied. Corrine is taking time away from work to raise her children and supposedly work on a screenplay. She feels that she's glaringly inadequate - from her career to the fact that she had to have her sluttish sister provide a womb for her twins. Luke has gotten off the merry-go-round of high-stakes Wall Street investment to find that there was ultimately not so much waiting for him to get off, particularly not his adulterous, social climbing wife or his spoiled, drug-experimenting daughter.

But when Luke stumbles up to Corrinne covered in the debris of the World Trade Center and then they find each other again as they man a food station for relief workers, they both begin to fell less like their lives are over and more like they have their whole lives ahead of them.

Summarized like that, it seems very simple, but around both Corrine and Luke swirl lives full of all manner of drama. Most intruiging of all, however, is the way these characters - given an awesome opportunity to start over in the wake of tragedy - so fiercely resist being happy. The Good Life is worth reading as a tasteful portrait of a disaster that's hard to look at, and to hear the echoes of the questions that rang in so many New Yorkers heads in the months and years following 9/11.

Oh, and Luke's wife is a rich bitch who knows her fashion and her daughter is a total mess and Corrinne's sister is a total pugslut and if you imagine yourself as Corrinne during the sex scenes, you might just pop a stiffy. Well, after all that seriousness I had to say SOMETHING to get all y'all bitches a'readin'!