August 10, 2008

"He seemed older and sophisticated and we had great sex, so why not? I met him in a club, naturally. I never thought he was very good-looking, but you could tell he thought he was. He believed it so much he could actually sell other people on the idea. He has that confidence everybody wants a piece of. This blond hair that looks like he has it trimmed about three times a day."
--from Story of My Life (1988)

Yesterday the New York Times reported that Rielle Hunter, the other woman in the John Edwards scandal, caught the eye of another public figure two decades earlier. For his novel of '80s misbehavior among New York's young, spoiled, and rich, Story of My Life, Jay McInerney modeled his narrator Alison Poole on Rielle (then named Lisa Druck), and the wild lifestyle of her 20-something friends.

Since the media may pick up on the more sensational aspects of McInerney's story--cocaine, promiscuous behavior and unprotected sex (during the era of AIDS), not to mention a plot-culminating abortion--I decided to pull the copy from our shelves and read for myself. Calling McInerney's novels "dated" is fair enough. The 190 pages I zipped through this afternoon would look alien to the post cellular crowd. Though Story of My Life will never be required for high school students, it still holds some Fitzgeraldian universal truths about monied thoughtlessness. So, you might ask, was Rielle/Lisa really this debauched?

It's a question you ultimately have to put aside when reading the novel, if only to trust the author's own storytelling instincts. These are fictional constructs, social extremes that fit nicely within McInerney's own urban landscape--he was a notorious party animal after all--and I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that the tales of sex, drugs, and boorishness are embellished composites from years of observance.

Told from Alison's perspective, nothing much happens in Story of My Life. She parties with friends Francesca, Didi, and Jeannie. She sleeps with Skip, Alex, and Dean, and comments on their abilities in bed. She is emotionally drawn to the older Dean--the book's Mr. Big--and plays mind games to keep him in tow. Money is both a source of anxiety and an entitlement. Parents and siblings remain distant and manipulative, dangling favors yet never following through. Bills go unpaid, friends fight and pass out and puke, STDs make the rounds without turning into full blown AIDS. No one dies, no one gets seriously hurt, no redemption or enlightenment are achieved. Why would there be? Alison and company are too cool to let that happen.

Though I was expecting a Bret Easton Ellis orgy of product placement and gratuitous violence, Alison's account is oddly muted. The reader feels as jaded as she does. The details are unnecessary. The low level shock value could also be our hindsight. While the technology has improved (Alison and friends can only call from pay phones and leave messages on machines), the habits haven't. We're probably too inured to Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan to care. This is a city where we are at greater risk of being hit by a falling supermodel than a car.

Reading McInerney's novels, however, does make you wonder: What became of these fast living, flip, spoiled scenesters of the 1980s? Segway to Rielle/Lisa. According to the Times, she moved to LA, married a lawyer, changed her name (first and last) and, apparently, reinvented herself as a filmmaker. For McInerney, the prevailing characteristic of the young Rielle/Lisa that inspired Alison was not her relationship with men but to honesty: “One of her most striking traits was her obsession with truth-telling and her horror of being lied to, something that I certainly took directly from Lisa.” Early in the novel Alison lays out her own thoughts on the subject: "Acting is about being true to your feelings, which is great since real life seems to be about being a liar and a hypocrite." Pair that with an Edwards quote Maureen Dowd pulled from one of the political videos Rielle was hired to make for his campaign:

“I’ve come to the personal conclusion that I actually want the country to see who I am, who I really am, but I don’t know what the result of that will be. But for me personally, I’d rather be successful or unsuccessful based on who I really am, not based on some plastic Ken doll that you put up in front of audiences.”

In this context Maureen Dowd is being self-congratulatory--she did coin the Ken doll crack in the first place--but to me this rather dull example of political hypocrisy begs a smaller question: what did Rielle see in Edwards? Maybe it's just having read McInerney's novel so closely, but I kind of hoped in the sequel that the Alison in Rielle would have better judgment.
--Peter Miller