|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Love in the time of terrorism The Good Life
Two of the main characters of this book, Corrine and Russel, have been taken from one of his earlier books Brightness Falls where Russel makes an aborted attempt to take over a publishing house. He was a member of the so-called ‘brat pack’ along with Bret Easton Ellis and their Editor Gary Jon who wrote these hip and trendy novels. The breakthrough novel of Jay McInerney was Bright Lights, Big City, a tale of coke-filled debauchery, a theme he has revisited time and again. His books have been have been immensely popular but critically undervalued, a fact which he says is enough to spoil his breakfast but not his lunch. His Story of my Life, for instance, the story of an year in the life of a young girl is one of the finest coming-of-age novels that one has read.
Both of them are caught up in unhappy marriages and meet soon after the collapse of the World Trade Centre. They then work together in a soup kitchen providing food to the firemen and workers. They meet, they work together and they fall in love, have a sizzling romance which is beautifully documented as their tenuous marriages are about to collapse. The novel explores New York in all its vulnerability after 9/11 and the story as told by McInerney is so detailed and so real that in some sense it feels like non-fiction. For instance, Corrine’s twins are so charming and loveable that I was not at all surprised to learn that McInerney has twins of his own. This could have really happened to real people is how you feel which is the ultimate test of a novelist. The city and its residents reel and then slowly pick up the pieces of their lives. Amidst the carnage, Luke and Corrine fall madly in love and the exhilaration of their love is tinged with the guilt of adultery. They are left to wonder that as they would never have met if 9/11 would not have happened is it better that 9/11 should not have happened? Though the answer seems so obvious they are never able to answer it. In the backdrop of 9/11, McInerney does what he does best — describe the ordinary life of New York in these extraordinary circumstances. Though of course ordinary life in New York is different from anywhere else. Salman is expected for dinner, for instance. He chronicles the drug overdoses; paedophilia, the helicopter flights to get to hospitals which sound ordinary to a New York and he does it well because he knows the city so intimately. Though it is set in the backdrop of 9/11, there is not even a veneer of sadness in the book because at its heart is a love story in which he describes what possibly is the best time of the lives of the principal characters. So though this book is about 9/11, you feel elated by the end because it is about the human heart. Some will, of course, say that is a fatal flaw.
|
Jay McInerney, the man who
wrote so vividly about Bolivian marching powder (a form of cocaine so
powerful that you feel that troops are marching in your head), is back
with yet another book. He described the party scene and life in New York
where people live as if there is no tomorrow. The author who had
explored the drug scene with gusto explores the life of its characters
through the prism of 9/11—the fall of the World Trade Centre buildings
and how it changes lives`85 In a sense, the fall of the World Trade
Centre buildings acts not only as a prism but also as a mirror since the
characters look at their lives and reflections and re-evaluate them. He
has been compared to Scott Fritzgerald, of who he is an unabashed
admirer, of Great Gatsby fame for his take on the urban scene..jpg)
This is the story of Luke,
a banker, who has given up a lucrative job