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A CONVERSATION
WITH JAY McINERNEY
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What
is The Good Life about for you?
The Good Life is first and foremost a love story. It's about
the way in which
the collective trauma of 9/11 prompted many of us, especially
those of us here in New York, to reevalute our lives, to reexamine
our values, our careers, our marriages. And it's about the difficulty
of reinventing yourself in and changing course in midlife.
Has fatherhood changed
your writing? Do you think you would have written The Good Life
if you hadn't had children?
Fatherhood has certainly reshaped my worldview and The
Good Life would have been a very different book if I weren't
a father. Being a parent extends your temporal horizon in both
directions: the future becomes far more tangible and important
to you as the place your children and their children will inhabit;
and the past becomes more vivid as well, since parenthood inevitably
carries you back to reflect on your own childhood and the dynamics
of your own interactions with your parents. The fact that the
main characters are parents is central to the concerns and even
the plot of The Good Life.
How
has age affected your writing, and vice versa? Do you focus
on different things now than you did earlier in your career?
And has your experience as a novelist transformed the way you
perceive the world—both on a larger scale (e.g., 9/11 and its
aftermath) and in the way individuals interact with each other?
Lately I have been thinking that The Good Life may be
my first book about adults; after passing forty, I had to finally
consider the fact that I couldn't keep writing
bildungsroman forever. Most of the protagonists of my previous
novels, whatever their age, were in some sense post-adolescents,
trying to reach an accommodation with the social order. The
Good Life is about people who signed the social contract years
ago; now they're looking for loopholes.
It's been suggested
that The Good Life is phase three for you, one being Bright
Lights, Big City, and two being Brightness Falls. What do you
make of this assessment?
I actually think of The Good Life as being the start of phase
two, the second act that we American writers aren't
supposed to have. On the other hand, I do think that The Good
Life is in some sense a third or fourth installment if
you count my third novel Story of My Life in my very quirky
history of New York since the eighties.
How
did you come to write The Good Life? What made you decide to
revisit the characters from Brightness Falls?
I'd always wanted to return to the cast of characters in Brightness
Falls. It's one of my favorite of my books. I really meant to do it
sooner. And I expect to again. Most of my books have a fairly
compressed time frame, and I was really eager to work with the
element of time, the passage of years in the lives of my characters.
The Washington Post,
among other publications, has called you one of the solid chroniclers
of his time. Do you see your work this way? Is it something you
set out to do when writing?
It's always dangerous claiming to chronicle your time
or your generation. But I like to think that my books collectively
contain a very vivid and accurate portrait of life for a certain
type of New Yorker of my generation.
All
of us not directly affected by the attacks remember the compulsion
to do something to ease the suffering of those who were. In
your case, that meant volunteering at a soup kitchen for relief
workers. What led you there, and how did your experiences at
the site inspire or inform the book?
Like everyone I know in New York, as soon as the initial
shock had worn off my impulse was to try to do something, to
help out in some way, to do anything that would make myself
somewhat useful and somewhat less helpless. A friend told me
about a soup kitchen which had just started up at the edge of
the site but access to downtown was severely restricted. But
after a few drinks a few nights after the eleventh I just jumped
on the number 6 train at midnight and popped up at Bowling Green
and found the soup kitchen which at that point was just a tent
and a coffee machine and some warming trays. And they were happy
to have me. And I kept going back. The soup kitchen in the book
is based on the one I worked at for six or seven weeks.
Portions of this novel
are set in Tennessee, which in The Good Life seems a sort of
antidote to the sense of dissolute chaos in New York. Would
you agree with this observation, and does it reflect your own
feelings about city and country life?
After 9/11 almost every New Yorker thought about their
roots, about the precariousness and danger of urban life and
by extension of the virtues of the rural life. Although I'm
a Yankee I married into the Southern experience and my kids
were born in Tennessee. I've always been fascinated
by Southern literature and in fact some of the most interesting
people I know in New York are expatriate Southerners. I have
a kind of nostalgia for the kind of roots that real Southerners
have—my own upbringing was too peripatetic
to give me much of a feeling of roots. In the end, though, the
experience of 9/11 made me feel more of a New Yorker than ever.
What is next for you?
Next for me is a new novel. And I hope to God it will be easier
and quicker to write than this one. |
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