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The Good Life
by Jay McInerney
The latest novel from the Bright Lights, Big City author, wine columnist, and occasional Iron Chef America judge finds two married Manhattanites meeting--and falling in love with--each other in the days after the 9/11 attacks.
Knopf, 368 pages
01/31/2006
$25.00
ISBN: 0375411402
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Village Voice Benjamin Strong
McInerney's latest book is a triumph, his finest novel since Brightness Falls.
Booklist Keir Graff
There have been a number of 9/11 novels lately, as writers grapple with what that terrible day means to us. This one is essential. [1 Dec 2005, p.7]
Daily Telegraph Christopher Cleave
This novel is so sensitively written, and often so funny, that it would be easy to miss the audacity of its complex, humanist vision at a time when other American novelists are writing a simpler, more spiritually uplifting version of its recent past.
USA Today Deirdre Donahue
The Good Life is a very human story.
The Independent Matt Thorne
The Good Life is undoubtedly one of McInerney's finest novels, yet it seems unlikely to be remembered as the definitive response to the events of 11 September.
Chicago Sun-Times Allison Block
The extraordinary circumstances in which McInerney places his characters showcase his talent for sharp social commentary.
Library Journal Bette-Lee Fox
Inveterate Gothamites will especially appreciate this love story between kindred spirits and between city dwellers and their wounded mecca. [1 Nov 2005, p.66]
PopMatters
The mastery of The Good Life lies not in plot twists or stylistic pyrotechnics. Instead, the novel is served best by the near perfect pitch and tone of McInerney's portrayal of that difficult time.
Publishers Weekly Alain de Botton
It is a tribute to McInerney's many talents that he can wrest from his schematic structure a novel that is both tender and entertaining. [28 Nov 2005, p.21]
San Francisco Chronicle Heller McAlpin
"The Good Life" captures some of the numbing shock that cast its pall over the city that fall, but its power is diluted by mawkish writing.
Christian Science Monitor Yvonne Zipp
At times, the prose gets so overheated that McInerney might just as well have made Luke a hot fireman and been done with it.
Boston Globe Gail Caldwell
"The Good Life" isn't a bad novel or a gratuitous one; it's just not as good or as deep as it might have been.
Slate Blake Bailey
Happily, the novel is nowhere near as bad as some of its detractors say, though it's not very good, either; indeed it's a curious amalgam of McInerney's two basic modes, witty satire and turgid social history.
The Observer Adam Mars-Jones
The unstable tone of The Good Life is a manifestation of the author's conflicting attitudes.
The Guardian Jay Parini
Only the wit of the writing and the swiftness of the narrative redeem a novel that was never likely to engage our hearts.
New York Review Of Books Joyce Carol Oates
The Good Life is McInerney's most fully imagined novel as it is his most ambitious and elegiac, the sentimental valentine of a middle-aged romantic to his rapidly vanishing youth.
Wall Street Journal Thomas Mallon
For all its social and historical ambitions, "The Good Life" will tell you nothing about 9/11 that you haven't seen dozens of times on cable news.
The Economist
There is nothing implicitly discomfiting about small personal stories told against the backdrop of grand tragedy. The problem here is style. Mr McInerney's prose is plain to the point of dumpy.
Washington Post Dan Chaon
A disappointment.... Honestly, it seems McInerney doesn't know what to do with this material.
The New York Times Book Review Paul Gray
With a little additional time for reflection, McInerney might have conceived a more resonant fictional use of the literal horrors in Lower Manhattan. Instead, he's turned them into a Hitchcockian MacGuffin, a crowd-gathering catalyst to draw attention to the novel's real subject, an oddly listless and unappealing adulterous affair.
Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
Of all the repellent interpretations of 9/11, Jay McInerney builds... The Good Life... around one of the slimiest: Sept. 11 as soul-cleansing for privileged New Yorkers.
Houston Chronicle Charles Matthews
Someday a writer will produce a fine novel about the way the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, changed our lives. Jay McInerney's The Good Life is not that novel.
The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
The novel is a bizarre mix of the genuinely moving and the trashily facile, the psychologically astute and the ridiculously cliched.
 The average user rating for this book is 6.3 (out of 10) based on 8 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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