Imagine an isolated island civilization that has evolved a rigid caste system. While complex, arcane rituals govern all aspects of everyday life, the inhabitants also enjoy sexual proclivities well beyond what mainstream America would likely condone. Into this ordered, if very different society, toss a nasty monkey wrench—the societal equivalent of Columbus landing at San Salvador, or the Imperial Japanese Army arriving on Bali. Even as the social order collapses, however briefly, in the face of changes too radical for the islanders’ narrow belief system to accommodate, the sexual frisson boils. All that remains is for a Margaret Mead to appear and report on the behavior of the natives. This role Jay McInerney assumes in his novel The Good Life, which follows two privileged New Yorkers in the wake of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. While 9/11 was, clearly, a national tragedy, it was also a major anthropological event within the constrained New York City that McInerney has, for most of the past two decades, chosen to explore—a geography that includes Manhattan south of 95th Street; parts of Long Island and Connecticut; but not one block of the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island or, God forbid, New Jersey. McInerney (who long divided his residence between Nashville and Manhattan but is now back in New York full time) is not so much concerned with New York, the American city where people are born, live, and die, as he is with New York, the cult society where scores of acolytes from Middle America compete for initiation. As with other cults, it is hard to get in, though escaping can be harder still. In a Jan. 31 review in The New York Times, critic Michiko Kakutani dismissed many of McInerney’s characters as “jaded hedonists,” but in a sociological sense they are no more hedonistic than were Mead’s Samoans—they are simply trapped within the hedonistic norms of the society they have embraced. Corrine Calloway and Luke McGavock, and their respective spouses, are members of slightly different castes within the rigid social hierarchy of McInerney’s island nation of Manhattan—she is a young member of the Anointed Literary Elite and he belongs to what might be termed the Secret Society of Obscenely Wealthy Financiers. Both have been more prone than their spouses to question the validity of their narrow, celebrity-obsessed worlds, and both have questioned (rightly so, to the outside observer) the effects of their cult membership on the children they are raising. When the towers collapse, both are drawn to volunteer work amid the ruins—and inevitably, to each other. More revealing than the scenes of their separate lives before the attack, or the affair that consumes them after they meet near Ground Zero, is the effect on both of being thrust, for the first time after decades of life within a mile of Central Park, into the presence of ordinary New Yorkers—cops and firemen and restaurant workers who have nothing in common with the rarified worlds these two know. Through encounters with these more or less ordinary Americans, Corrine and Luke are allowed to see how artificial and status-driven their lives have been. And in the moment that McInerney leaves the familiar confines of the dinner party and charity event, he ceases to be merely an anthropologist and becomes, for the first time perhaps since his early novels, a writer of depth. After Bright Lights, Big City was published in 1984, critics compared McInerney to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and in many ways The Good Life is an even more fitting companion to The Great Gatsby. Both novels have a depth that transcends the shallowness of many of their characters, and a grace that outweighs their occasional sloppy bits (think of the Gatsby scene where Daisy cries over all the shirts). Like Fitzgerald’s Nick, Luke McGavock works in a world of stocks and bonds that is so poorly rendered as to be a Saturday morning cartoon notion of Wall Street, yet scenes between Corrine, her husband Russell, and her impetuous sister (who is also the biological mother of Corrine’s twins, via in vitro fertilization) are heartbreakingly real. (Corrine and Russell were also the subjects of Brightness Falls, a previous novel, so their history will be familiar ground for some readers.) But the greatest reason for comparing McInerney to Fitzgerald is what motivates his sociological exploration: the attempt to discover some truth about American life through the examination of people so insular and isolated as to seem from another planet. At a dinner party Corrine attends on the night of Sept. 10, a famous film director holds forth, but the voice could be McInerney delivering a lecture on Fitzgerald: “I grew up in the era of the existential hero…We inherited modernism and we were running with it. The quest for meaning in a meaningless universe. Breathless, La Dolce Vita, Taxi Driver…It was a tag-team event between rock and roll and the, if you will excuse the expression, cinema—the search for authenticity.” Like Fitzgerald before him, McInerney manages to excavate the authentic that lies buried within the grotesque and unrealistic. As with reading Margaret Mead (whose sociological accuracy has been widely attacked in recent decades), the reader may or may not come away with any real knowledge of Samoan (or Wall Street) sexual practices, but will, through contrast, learn something fresh and vital about our own wounded society. In the case of Corrine and Luke, the love affair runs it course, but as the two immerse themselves in helping to heal a damaged city, both are drawn, painfully, into the harder work of healing their own marriages and families. The novel’s most complex supporting character is Jerry, a mob-connected nightclub manager who runs the soup kitchen where Corrine and Luke serve food to workers digging through the rubble. By seizing onto Jerry as a friend—she invites him to an awkward family Thanksgiving after the soup kitchen is shut down by the city—Corrine begins to see her life, and her affair with Luke, as it might appear to those outside her rarified circle. Meanwhile, Luke is forced to confront his teenage daughter’s drug addiction, and is able to connect emotionally with her by taking the girl out of the city to revisit his Tennessee roots. In these scenes Luke fully becomes the modernist hero Fitzgerald and McInerney most admire. After their Thanksgiving retreats, Luke and Corrine are free to move toward an enlightened if existential conclusion that, while perhaps falling short of “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” offers genuine hope for the future, hinting that even jaded hedonists can awaken from narcissism.