March 13th, 2006
Is it men writing women or just irritating characters?
I’ve recently been reading Jay McInerney’s new novel The Good Life and foundered a little. McInerney is probably best known for his novel Bright Lights, Big City, a coke-driven chronicle of 1980s New York but I last encountered him as a character in Brett Easton Ellis’ excellent fact within fiction novel of last year, Lunar Park. The two writers, who occupy the same oeuvre of writing about twentysomething excess, appear in Ellis’ work, but McInerney was apparently unhappy to be featured in the book.
Reading his latest novel, I hadn’t gotten very far when I was aware that something really irked me about it that I couldn’t place. The book - a post 9/11 tale of ennui and infidelity - kept falling short and several times I thought I’d put my finger on it. Gradually, I reached one conclusion: it’s his female characters. Was it the puddle-deep Sasha and Corinne that grated on me? Was this yet another example of a male writer failing spectacularly in his bid to represent a female voice? Perhaps he was doing a Martin Amis job on Night Train, when he attempted to write as a female detective (it didn’t work) or even JM Coatzee with Elizabeth Costello. That’s not to say that men can’t write women - look at DH Lawrence and Shakespeare.
No, as the novel wore on, I started to release that it wasn’t just Corinne or Sasha. It’s all the characters that don’t ring true. They’re transparent, ersatz and damn annoying. They lunged from one self-obsessed crisis to another, spouting the kind of dialogue that ought to get them shoved into the Hudson in cement slippers.
Having only just finished it, I’m not sure what I think of the book as whole, which is written in a new genre The New Yorker dubs “the 9/11 novel”. Writer Tod Goldberg is similarly displeased and points to the final paragraph of Don Chaon’s accurate review in The Washington Post:
“Honestly, it seems McInerney doesn’t know what to do with this material. He skirts the complex observations and deep feelings discussed in his moving essays on 9/11. Perhaps the tragedy feels so sacrosanct, so enormous, that he has chosen not to apply the skills that are closest to his true talent, and what’s left is this odd, stilted, earnestly tremulous book. But it’s kind of scary. If Jay McInerney can’t bring himself to write a Jay McInerney novel about New York during 9/11, then maybe Naipaul was right�”
Sadly, I had to read the whole thing for work but you don’t, thanks to John Crace in The Guardian, who has the whole book digested in 500 words. He offers an even pithier summation at the end: “Four New Yorkers in a failed search for a personality”.
March 14th, 2006 at 10:08 am
I reckon McInerney writes about characters that in real life ARE very shallow and self obsessed and not wholly likeable. That’s one of the issues with his books. Those kinds of characters in the 1980s (Bright Lights, Big City and Brightness Falls) were living in a time when being shallow, materialistic and vapid was almost celebrated. Now that we’re past that era, these characters seem out of place and it’s more difficult to erad about them out of context.
Also, I know that there are some men who are bad at writing good female characters but in the spirit of equality, there are also some women who are appalling at writing men too!
March 14th, 2006 at 11:08 am
I really liked McInerney’s earlier books, particularly Brightness Falls and Story of My Life, or at least I did when I read them all about ten years ago, but the new one (which I had to read for work too, or I wouldn’t have finished it) is a bit…bleah. I don’t think he’s particulary bad at writing female characters but, as you say, everyone in the book is just so vapid and solipsistic you can’t care much about them.
I think Nick Hornby is particularly dreadful at writing female characters, but then, I loathe his cuddly patronising “women are so much more sensible than men because women don’t care about music or pop culture or anything vaguely interesting” crap. Also, there’s a very long discussion of male writers writing female characters here!
March 14th, 2006 at 9:08 pm
Bright Lights, Big City?
Sounds really glitzy and showbiz
March 15th, 2006 at 9:42 am
It’s actually about a young guy who moves to New York in the 1980s. It was compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald in the way it depicted young Manhattanites living in a carefree, materialistic and hedonistic. Also remarkable for the fact taht it is one of the few novels ever to be written in the second person. In my view, it’s got one of the best opening chapters ever!