{"product_id":"the-good-life-isbn-9780375725456","title":"The Good Life","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eIn this bestselling novel, the author of \u003ci\u003eBright Lights, Big City\u003c\/i\u003e unveils a story of love, family, conflicting desires,  and catastrophic loss in a powerfully searing work of fiction.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eClinging to  a semiprecarious existence in TriBeCa, Corrine and Russell Calloway have survived  a separation and are wonderstruck by young twins whose provenance is nothing less  than miraculous. Several miles uptown and perched near the top of the Upper East  Side’s social register, Luke McGavock has postponed his accumulation of wealth in  an attempt to recover the sense of purpose now lacking in a life that often gives  him pause. But on a September morning, brightness falls horribly from the sky, and  people worlds apart suddenly find themselves working side by side at the devastated  site.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWise, surprising, and, ultimately, heart-stoppingly redemptive, \u003ci\u003eThe Good Life\u003c\/i\u003e captures lives that allow us to see–through personal, social, and moral complexity–more  clearly into the heart of things.\u003c\/p\u003e“A real love story . . . with a sympathy and depth new to McInerney’s fiction.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The Good Life\u003c\/i\u003e is McInerney’s most fully imagined novel as it is his most ambitious and elegiac.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“A triumph.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Village Voice\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“McInerney at his narrative best.”—\u003ci\u003eChicago Sun-Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eJay McInerney \u003c\/b\u003eis the author of eight novels, a collection of short stories and three collections of essays on wine. He lives in New York City and Bridgehampton, New York.\u003c\/p\u003eSummer used to be as endless as the ocean when she was a girl and   her family rented the gray shingled cottage on Nantucket. Now, she   found it hard to believe she was already back in Manhattan and the   kids were in school and she was already racing home, late again,   feeling guilty that she'd lingered over a drink with Casey Reynes.   The kids had been home for hours after their first day in first   grade, and she had yet to hear about it.Women blamed themselves; men blamed anything but.This was Corrine's interpretation of the guilt nipping at her high   heels as she cantered up Hudson Street from the subway, passing the   hand-lettered sign in the window of their Chinese takeout: FRESHLY GROUNDED COFFEE. Guilt about leaving the kids for so long, about not   helping Russell with dinner, about attempting to restart her   long-dormant professional life. Oh, to be grounded herself.   Seven-fifteen by her watch. Still attuned to the languorous rhythm of   the summer—they'd just closed up the house in Sagaponack four days   ago—she'd barely had time to kiss the kids good-bye this morning and   now the guests would be arriving at any minute, Russell frenzied with   cooking and child care.Bad mother, bad wife, bad hostess. \u003ci\u003eBad\u003c\/i\u003e.When she had yearned to be a mother, imagining what it would be like   to be a parent, it had been easy to conjure the joy . . . the scenes   of tenderness, the Pieta moments. What you don't picture are the   guilt and the fear that take up residence at the front of your brain,   like evil twins you didn't bargain for. Fear because you're always   worried about what might go wrong, especially if your kids were born,   as hers were, three months early. You can never forget the sight of   them those first few days, intubated under glass, veined eggshell   skulls and pink writhing limbs—the image stays with you even as they   grow, reminding you of just how fragile these creatures are, how   flimsy your own defenses. And guilt because you can never possibly do   enough. There's never enough time. No matter how much love and   attention you lavish on them, you're always afraid that it will never   be enough.Corrine had become a connoisseur of guilt; not for her the stabbing   thrust of regret for an ill-conceived act—but, rather, the dull and   steady throb of chronic guilt, even as she'd done her best to   rearrange her life around her kids, quitting her job to take care of   them and, over the past two years, working highly flexible hours on a   screenplay and on a project that was the obverse of a busman's   holiday—a start-up venture called Momtomtom.com, which had been on   the verge of a big launch this past spring, when the Internet bubble   started to deflate and the venture capital dried up. This afternoon,   she'd spent four hours making a presentation to a possible backer,   hustling for seed money for the Web site. As these prospects dimmed,   she'd been trying to set up meetings on the screenplay, an adaptation   of Graham Greene's \u003ci\u003eThe Heart of the Matter\u003c\/i\u003e. And here were the   theoretical bookends of her existence, the maternal and the   romantic—the latter submerged and almost extinct. In fact, that had   been her secret intention in writing this script: to try to rekindle   the romance and fan it back to life.Corrine hadn't wanted to be one of those mothers who paid someone   else to raise her kids; for the first five years, to the astonishment   of her friends and former colleagues, she'd stayed at home. Manhattan   was an existential town, in which identity was a function of   professional accomplishment; only the very young and the very rich   were permitted to be idle. The latter, like her friend Casey Reynes,   had their charities and their personal assistants and inevitably   managed to convey the impression that all this constituted an   exhausting grind. Russell had initially supported her maternal ideal,   though, as the years went by and their peers bought vacation homes in   the Hamptons, he couldn't consistently disguise his resentment over   their straitened finances, or his sense that his stay-at-home wife   had become translucent, if not invisible, within the walls of their   loft—a nanny without salary.Writing a screenplay was, in their circle, code for being unemployed;   finishing the first draft failed to produce the sense of   accomplishment she'd expected. A screenplay, after all, was a kind of   theoretical object, a recipe rather than the meal itself. And thus   far she hadn't had much luck in assembling the ingredients. So when   the kids entered preschool last year, she had tried to turn her   obsession with child rearing into a profession—formalizing the body   of knowledge she'd acquired as a full-time city mother into a viable   on-line resource. If that plan didn't work out, she would have to   return to the job marketplace, as much for her own self-esteem as to   defray the $34,000 tuition fees for the kids.A homeless man was encamped in the shadow of construction scaffolding   across the street from her building—a rarer sight than it would have   been ten years ago. A young, dirt-caked slacker with a ragged goatee,   a bull terrier on a leash, and a paper coffee cup at his feet. As   Corrine hurried past, he said, \"Hey, beautiful. I need a blow job. I   need a place in the Hamptons. I need a movie role.\"She paused, registering the humor—and her husband would have loved   this, storing it away with all the other anecdotes he used to   illustrate his wife's hilarious singularity—but instead of laughing,   she was thinking about \u003ci\u003eneeds\u003c\/i\u003e. What we need in order to make life   bearable.Suddenly coming to her senses, the panhandler gaping at her.\"I need romance,\" said Corrine, dropping a dollar in the wishing well   of his cup. \"Whatever happened to the romance?\"She burst into her apartment, aching for her children, who over the   course of the interminable afternoon might have died, dashed their   heads against the edge of the coffee table she kept vowing to   replace, been kidnapped, or forgotten her entirely. Corrine would   have been less surprised at any of these scenarios than she was to   see Hilary on the sofa, playing with the kids.\"Mom, guess what. You won't \u003ci\u003ebelieve\u003c\/i\u003e! Aunt Hilary's here.\"Her daughter, Storey, loved to deliver news and make announcements.It's true—she wouldn't believe. Last Corrine knew, her little sister   had been in L.A. She'd tried calling as recently as last week, only   to be told the number had been disconnected. And now here she was in   TriBeCa, reclining on Corrine's couch with Jeremy in her lap. No   matter that Corrine had seen her dozens of times in the intervening   years: Hilary was preserved, in Corrine's mind, semifrozen at the age   of fifteen, the last year they'd shared a domicile, so that it was   always a surprise to see her as a woman, and a pretty convincing one   at that. Only a few evanescent lines at the corners of her eyes   hinted that she'd passed thirty a few years before.The first thing Corrine did, pure reflex, was to scoop Jeremy up into   her arms and hug him, but instead of clutching her, he squirmed.\"Hey, sis.\" Hilary rose from the couch, stretching lithe and catlike   in her leopard top. As if to preserve Corrine's illusion of her   youthfulness, she still moved and dressed like a teenager, and had   the body to carry it off. \"Thought I'd surprise you.\"\"I'm . . . I \u003ci\u003eam\u003c\/i\u003e.\" Corrine belatedly hugged her sister with the arm   not holding Jeremy—a sister sandwich, with her son—their son?—in   the middle. Surprised, yes, Corrine thought . . . although at some   point unpredictability becomes a pattern. \"You look . . . great,\"   Corrine said.\"Thanks.\"\"Aunt Hilary's been in \u003ci\u003eParis\u003c\/i\u003e,\" Storey said.\"Paris?\"Jeremy squirmed out of Corrine's grasp and dropped onto the ottoman.\"Well, actually I came from London today, but I've been in Paris for   the past two weeks.\"\"She met Madeleine,\" Storey said, holding up her favorite book. \"Can   you \u003ci\u003ebelieve\u003c\/i\u003e it, Mom? Aunt Hilary \u003ci\u003eknows\u003c\/i\u003e her. Why didn't you tell us   she knows Madeline?\"\"I had no idea,\" Corrine said, casting a reproving glance at her   sister. \"Although, actually, now that I think about it, I'm not   surprised at all. Your aunt Hilary knows just about everybody in the   whole world.\"\"The \u003ci\u003ewhole\u003c\/i\u003e world?\"\"Your mom's just making a little joke.\"It was true—you couldn't watch a movie or open a magazine without   Hilary dropping intimate remarks about the two-dimensional icons   therein. Why shouldn't she know Madeline?\"Aunt Hilary saw her at the Eiffel Tower with Miss Clavel and the   other little girls.\"\"What's so great about Madeline?\" Jeremy asked. \"She's just a little girl.\"Just like Hilary to tell Storey she was acquainted with a fictional   character, fiction being her great specialty. Corrine didn't want   Storey getting mocked for relating this triumph at school. She was   feeling ambivalent enough about the Fluffies—the fairylike creatures   that she had conjured up for the kids when they were three, who had   their own biographies and their own little house in the kids'   bedroom. They'd been through this once before when Hilary claimed to   be great friends with Barbie—to whom she bore more than a passing   resemblance.\"Corrine,\" Hilary said, \"why are you looking at me that way?\"\"What way?\" Storey demanded. \"What way is she looking at you? Mom,   what does she mean?\"Jeremy was bouncing up and down on the sofa.\"Have you got a place to stay?\"\"Collin has this loft in SoHo? But I have to call his neighbors for   the keys. I think I may have the wrong number or something.\"As if, Corrine thought, she was supposed to know who Collin was. Some   fucking drug dealer, minor English aristocrat, or bass player, if   experience was any guide. She gestured toward the couch. \"You're   welcome to the guest suite.\" Theirs was one of those old tunnel-style   TriBeCa lofts, shaped like Manhattan itself, long and skinny, the   most space they could find for the money back in 1990, when the area   was still considered remote—an eighteen-by-eighty-foot rectangle   with a single bathroom carved out of commercial space in the   seventies. They'd walled off first one bedroom in the back and then   another when the children were born, and kept telling themselves, as   the years slipped past, that they'd probably move by the time the   kids needed separate bedrooms. Which they did now. The experts said   six was the age, but somehow all of the possible solutions seemed to   require more cash than they commanded.Russell was calling out from behind the kitchen counter. She wondered   how he was taking this.\"Can Aunt Hilary give us our bath?\" Storey asked. \"Please please please.\"\"I suppose so,\" said Corrine.\"Race you to the bathroom,\" Storey told her brother.\"We will \u003ci\u003ewalk\u003c\/i\u003e to the bathroom,\" Corrine said, grabbing hold of the   back of Jeremy's shirt. Last week, he'd slipped and bruised his   forehead—so Corrine reminded herself as she tried to justify the   note of irritation in her voice.Russell, meanwhile, was in his cooking frenzy in what they called the   kitchen, retaining the nomenclature of residences with discrete   rooms, flailing away with his ten-inch German chef's knife, juggling   his beloved copper pots and French steel pans, which weighed as much   as the unused dumbbells in the bedroom closet, the heft of which   seemed to her to have as much to do with the macho aesthetics of   amateur chefdom as with heat distribution. Cooking was a new sphere   of masculine competition; Russell and Washington and his chef friend   Carlo had lately taken to comparing notes on butchers and cutlery the   way they used to deconstruct stereo equipment, garage bands, and   young novelists. For fifteen years, Russell had been perfectly happy   with their Calphalon pots, a wedding present from Macy's, until   Washington told him the sous-chef at JoJo said they were for pussies.She kissed him on the cheek.\"I promise I had no idea,\" she whispered.   \"I haven't spoken to her in weeks—months, probably. You're not   furious, are you?\"\"Don't worry, she exonerated you.\"She put a finger to her lips. Russell seemed incapable of speaking at   any volume but loud, a characteristic ill-suited to loft living.\"At least she didn't show up with some head-banger or felon in tow.\"   She put her arms around her husband's ribs. \"Is she going to spoil   your perfect seating chart? I don't see how we can—\"\"No big deal,\" Russell said, chopping away at a leek.Corrine could hardly believe her ears. Russell was a maniac about his   dinner parties. He was capable of throwing a tantrum if Corrine added   someone at the last minute. It was one of the few areas of life in   which he was prissy. When he put on his chef\/host hat, everything had   to be just so. Not to mention the fact that he'd grown tired of the   saga of the prodigal sister-in-law, although he wouldn't admit it.She shook her head. \"You mean you won't have a heart attack if   there's an uneven number at the table?\"\"Actually, Salman canceled this afternoon. And then Jim called and   said Cody Erhardt was in town and would I mind if he joined us.\"Now she understood. \"Did Salman have an excuse?\"\"He's got a deadline and he leaves on his book tour tomorrow.\"Corrine could tell he was disappointed, though he liked to act as if   having Salman Rushdie over to dinner was no big deal. That was one of   the things she hated about New York, how you were supposed to be cool   and take for granted the awe-inspiring people and events you'd   fantasized about back home in Altoona or Amherst. By the time you   were behind the velvet ropes or sitting at the front booth, you were   probably too jaded to admit how lucky you felt or to enjoy it the way   you once imagined you would have.A Novel","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44861649420517,"sku":"NP9780375725456","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375725456.jpg?v=1767739591","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-good-life-isbn-9780375725456","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}