The Good Life

Jay McInerney revisits ten years on some of the characters that populated Brightness Falls. Luke McGavock, in the enviable position of having made more money than he can spend, has chosen to take a sabbatical in which he might recover the sense of purpose suddenly lacking in his life. But his wife is more than up to the task of spending and very much a part of Upper East Side society, which affects their daughter in ways that he shudders to think about. Meanwhile, Russell and Corrine Galloway have survived a separation and managed to produce, by extraordinary medical means, two children who help bind them together, even if the promise of their early years together has thinned and faded. Russell is still in publishing, though in a diminished role, while Corrine casts about for a role she might play other than mother. These are only some of the lives transformed by 9/11, in which both McGavock and the Calloways lose a friend, and Luke and Corrine soon find themselves side by side, providing food and drink to workers at the devastated site, while feeling lost anywhere else. This novel is the story of the love that develops between them, people battered by loss and betrayal, by memory and regret, by fresh disappointment and shocks, people determined to discover, before it's too late, what the good life truly is.