'It's a Whole New World'
Jay McInerney talks about his new post-9/11 novel
By John Freeman
For about two decades now, Jay McInerney has been a romantic hiding in plain view. It's been a long time since he wound up on the society page, or even cavorted in clubs with fellow so-called "Brat Pack" novelists Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz. He's been too busy raising his two kids.
It's not like this change should be a complete surprise, nor is it really a function of age. Even McInerney's zeitgeist-capturing 1984 debut, Bright Lights, Big City, portrayed New York as a place where the young ferry their innocence to and from clubs, hoping to make it home before they spoiled it.
This leads to a fallen-world mentality—and, not surprisingly, McInerney's recent novels have been practically Updikean in their portrait of relations between the sexes. In Brightness Falls (1992), he showed what happened when a generation of pleasure-seekers hit that ultimate killjoy—marriage—while Last of the Savages (1996) peered down the wormhole of the '60s into America's past.
But nothing compares to the emotional ambition of his latest novel, The Good Life, which seeks to remember those heady, headlong days in the wake of September 11, when irony was dead and people wanted to be their best selves. Sitting at New York's hippest new downtown eatery, The Spotted Pig, the 51-year-old author explained why he had to capture this moment above all else before it faded.
Russ and Corrine Calloway appear in Brightness Falls. Why did you chose to go back to them here?
I always had it in the back of my mind that Russ and Corrine would be my Rabbit Angstrom. I thought of them as representative figures of my generation of people who come to New York in the '80s. For a variety of reasons, some of them having to do with a terrible case of writer's block, it just took me longer than I planned. I was trying to create a new story for them when September 11 came—and I just thought, it's a whole new world, why not register the event through them.
A few of the novelists who have written about 9/11 have earned flak for that. Are you worried about this?
I think Jonathan Safran Foer took some really unfair grief for alleged presumption and exploitation. I think it's outrageous for anyone to question the right of a novelist to try and make sense of and interpret this experience. And several critics that I saw did, and I think, shame on them. One of the greatest bodies of literature in the 20th century is Holocaust literature. For Christ's sake, is this somehow sacrosanct? Can we not write about 9/11? I think we must write about it.
Some of the book's most powerful moments happen down at Ground Zero, where Corrine goes to volunteer. Did you spend much time there?
Yes, I knew somebody who knew somebody—that started this thing. And he said, "Go down there, they really need help." So I got on the subway, since the No. 6 train went right there. It came off at Bowling Green: stopped right there. So I popped up at Ground Zero, and they were happy to have help, and I did that for a couple of months. It was a way of feeling useful, if nothing else.
In the novel, two characters meet at Ground Zero and strike up an affair. It seems funny, we've thought about 9/11 babies or 9/11 marriages—there were probably just as many 9/11 separations or divorces spawned by this kind of thing.
Yeah, I know people who woke and they thought, [shoot], if a plane hits the building, is this the person that I want to die with? And they discovered the answer was no. I even know a guy who got a sex-change operation. He decided to stop living the lie. Left his family behind.
You used real names in this novel—which is one of the first times I've seen you do it. Why this time around?
You know, I am writing about contemporary New York, and there is a sense in which there have to be portals of interpenetration between my imagined New York and the one the New York Times and the New York Post write about. In the case of those literary figures, you know, Russell [Calloway] is an editor. The movie director isn't real. I didn't want to have Quentin Tarantino walking into the book, that kind of glossy bold-faced name would upset the spell of an imagined world.
I guess that's the same principle Bret Easton Ellis was following in his recent novel, Lunar Park, where you appear in a cameo and do lines of cocaine off the hood of a Porsche.
I get tired of that persona. That person is me in 1989. [Ellis] actually wrote that scene 10, 12 years ago. It's just not me anymore. But on the other hand, as a sort of historical document, I find it interesting. And I found it a really good book. But, as times go by, our projects diverge more and more, and our sensibilities diverge more and more.
And you've continued writing about New York. In a lot of your books, there is this sense that for all the delights the city offers up, there is also this lurking danger. Did you ever feel like 9/11 was predicted? I mean, the WTC is on the cover of Bright, Lights, Big City.
Well, the interesting thing is, when I came to New York in 1980, the sense of danger was externalized. It was on the streets. Everyone I know except me was mugged on a regular basis. My car was stolen, twice! My apartment was broken into. I don't know how I managed to survive these drunken trips on the subway at 3 a.m. Going down into the subway was a scary proposition. You really felt like you were taking your life into your own hands. I felt like we lost something when this city became so safe, you couldn't locate the edge.
Did you look up every time a plane flew over for a while?
I still do.