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First, let's give credit where credit is due - McInerney has chutzpah. When writing this book - a sequel to his 1993 novel Brightness Falls - he surely knew that he was reaching. Reportedly working on a thriller about terrorists in airplanes in his Lower Manhattan apartment at the time of the 9/11 attacks, he quickly threw out what he had and "found" this novel in the wreckage, as it were. While Brightness was about a married couple's descent into early middle age in the days before and after Wall Street's previous tragedy (the "Black Monday" stock market crash of October 1987), The Good Life picks up his protagonists, the Calloways, on the cusp of their mid-life crises writ large.

The enormous metaphors for their marriage about to fall can be seen clearly from the windows of their TriBeCa loft.

At its outset, the novel mines some compelling veins of 9/11 lore. He indelibly describes the quickly established hierarchy of soup kitchens in the area surrounding Ground Zero. Echoing the see-and-be-seen nature of the hot new restaurants in the city, you can only get the lead ladle, like the best seat in the house, if you are either a movie star or "seriously connected." He also deftly sketches the rumor and storytelling that followed the tragedy: that the wine cellar for Windows of the World, the restaurant at the top of the north tower, survived intact, the endless emails of Auden's "September 1, 1939," and stories of anthrax found at the offices of Condé Nast.

The Good Life is at its strongest in the few chapters describing the immediate aftermath of the towers falling, and at that point, it is engaging and affecting. For the next two-thirds, however, it ultimately proves to be just another entry in the overflowing coffers of the Adultery Novel.

McInerney lays it on thick with the main protagonists Luke McGavock and Corinne Callaway meeting on the streets of Bowling Green covered in the Towers' dust within shouting distance of the World Trade Center complex. He thinks that perhaps she is an angel walking this earth. She thinks that he might be "a statue commemorating ? some noble defeat - a Confederate general, perhaps."

As the novel wears on, Luke is portrayed as almost laughably perfect and Corinne is so overwhelmingly - and unbelievably - wronged that we understand tacitly that they must be together. When they are continuing their illicit-yet-life-affirming affair by firelight in Nantucket, they finish each others' sentences about Zeus slicing hermaphrodites in two from Plato's Symposium. "Was it possible?" that Luke, rather than her husband, "might be her long-lost twin"? He answers, "I had a glimmer of that feeling when I saw you. Walking out of the ruins. And there you were."

The book is not without its pleasures. McInerney has a sure eye for the flourishes and blemishes of Manhattan's aristocracy with his thinly-veiled portraits of those who grace the society pages of the Times. He can dish and name-drop with the best of them and in the moments where he allows his pen to capture the glint of the gilded class, he captures the reader's attention. Finally, it is in his grasp of the peculiar dialect that is indigenous to teenagers, he reaches his own greatest heights. From their obvious subterfuge to their breathless sentence structure, he has a verisimilitude in describing their dialogue that is unfortunately missing from much of the rest of the characters in the book.

Unfortunately, the particulars of the groaning denouement cannot be discussed here for fear of ruining the ending, but suffice to say that McInerney very much wants to have his cake and eat it too, giving the reader both the semi-tragic ending he seems to be stretching for and the happily-ever-after that the bulk of the book is driving towards. The big 9/11 book has yet to be written - don't let the hype fool you. Enjoy The Good Life; just don't take it seriously. Read it until your eyes tire from rolling and then put it down for good.