All fall down

The Good Life
By Jay McInerney
Knopf, 353 pp., $25

Was there ever really such a thing as the New York novel? Certainly we've long assumed the place had its own literary province, from the sorry fineries of Edith Wharton to the rough-hewn neighborhoods of Grace Paley and E. L. Doctorow. But like rock 'n' roll or religion, New York as a city and a polyglot culture is just too big for its own list of acolytes. The million-plus stories in the naked city simply add up to the sprawl of American literature, so that the idea of a New York novel per se is mere confection.

September 11 may have changed all that, but perhaps not as much as some writers would assume, the vibrancy of New York remaining greater even than its catastrophes. Jay McInerney has long loved the place, from the yeasty vagaries of ''Bright Lights, Big City" to the sadder, deeper realms portrayed in his best novel, ''Brightness Falls," so it's no surprise that he would want to render the post9/11 climate in ''The Good Life." The novel is in many ways a sequel to ''Brightness Falls," resurrecting the literary power couple there -- Russell and Corrine Calloway -- into a pair on the verge of middle age, young twins and marital troubles in tow. And while the story opens within the quotidian pleasures and frenzies of a privileged Manhattan -- loft in Tribeca, dinner parties, conversations about private schools and good wine years -- we realize soon enough that the brilliant weather outside resembles that blue, blue sky that will live in infamy: early September 2001.

''The Good Life" is really the intertwining of two stories: one of Russell and Corrine and their stressed-out marriage, and one belonging to the high-flying Luke and Sasha McGavock. A financial wizard who has taken early retirement (three weeks after the death of his father, he wryly notes), Luke fiddles with the idea of a more meaningful life, but meanwhile has the present one to contend with: a wife whose cold, legendary Page 6 beauty only underscores the distance between them, a daughter whose adolescent burnouts land her in rehab. And then the world changes, for Luke and Corrine and the rest of New York. On the afternoon of September 12, when Luke is walking uptown in an ash-covered daze, a stranger passes him a bottle of water and asks if he is all right. He's been digging for the past 24 hours at the site of the towers, and Corrine -- Evian in hand -- is the first person outside ground zero whom Luke encounters. So begins a friendship based on mutual terror and care.

Ash Wednesday, McInerney calls it, ''a Black Mass version of the old ticker-tape parades of lower Broadway." The fathomless black hole of ground zero and its attendant trauma culture are evocatively portrayed in ''The Good Life," and this conscientious rendering may be the best part of the novel -- in part because it widens the moral context of its characters' lives. Thrust into the helpless intensity of those first few days after the towers fall, Luke begins volunteering at a makeshift soup kitchen; Corrine, who feels a similar estrangement from her own little world, puts the twins to bed and joins him on the night shift. Pouring coffee and running around getting restaurant ziti for hundreds of rescue workers, the two hurtle toward each other like strangers on the Titanic. Luke has lost a good friend he was on his way to meet that morning at Windows on the World; Corrine and Russell are half-mourning a half-close social friend who has also disappeared. Luke can't talk to Sasha, who's oblivious to everything but her talk-of-the-town scandal with a corporate raider; Corrine isn't even pretending to talk to Russell, whose zipper-friendly affections for a former assistant have just been exposed. So: Petals among the ashes, and all that. If September 11 and its collective and individual memories and agonies are now part of the public domain, then they were bound to show up soon as the shroud-ridden backdrop for the sexy side of Thanatos.

''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. It's a solid piece of au courant realism overshadowed by an American calamity, and that juxtaposition makes the milieu of McInerney's characters seem all the more subject to pathos -- bonfire of the vanities, indeed. The darkest parts of ''The Good Life" are what ring the most true, whether the fellow having a grief meltdown at ground zero or the silent domestic anguish of a couple faced with their own demise.

But then I've always preferred McInerney's melancholy to his satire: He seems just a bit too charmed by the very people he seeks to send up. Thus it is that he can etch a particular kind of Manhattan insider -- Ambien and Viagra next to the latest Don DeLillo on the bedside table -- with piercing exactitude, but he also has to insinuate ''Salman" as a no-show guest of Russell and Corrine's in the first few pages of the novel. This is sort of absurd, and jarring, and maybe too revealing: ''Corrine could tell [her husband] was disappointed, though he liked to act as if having Salman Rushdie over to dinner was no big deal." If that's true, then when did it become imperative (or even just cool) to throw real-life writers into works of fiction?

Nan and Gay Talese are lurking around, too, though it's not as if such little lapses matter much in the scheme of a 9/11 novel, which is what ''The Good Life" seeks to be. The title is ironic, with McInerney suggesting throughout that the glittery false gods of a particular stratosphere of moneyed New York don't amount to much in the face of turmoil, fear, grief, or plain old unhappiness. The moral counterpart to the world of Sasha and other faux elites is Luke's family of origin in Tennessee: a preacher father, long dead, and his equestrian wife, who counsels her son on his marital woes, practices horse therapy with wounded children, and doesn't give a damn about her wrinkles. Such goodness is the best Luke and the others can hope for in their new awareness, wrapped as they are in somber memories of an old New York -- the one they clung to ''before the idea of the protean city as eternal and indestructible had been called into doubt." ''The Good Life" may be a reflective novel, but it winds up with a sensibility more wistful than elegiac -- possessing the bittersweet human truth that, after the fallout has cleared, even tragedy gets whittled down by time.

Gail Caldwell is chief book critic of the Globe. She can be reached at caldwell@globe.com.