(“The Good Life” by Jay McInerney, Alfred A Knopf, 355 pages, $25.) You know he wrote “Bright Lights, Big City,” published in 1984 and hailed as one of the new novels in which a young writer looked unflinchingly out on a gritty world instead of wretchedly in at his own navel.

You know it was also a novelty, written entirely in the second person, a view through the debauched eye of a young New Yorker, spiraling down into meaningless hedonism, ending in redemption by way of a dinner roll. You accept the Christian symbolism gracefully.

You fast-forward to the present. Now Jay McInerney is writing about the same New York, September 2001. Has he still got it? You note there have been several novels in between, some critical successes, but none ever again as renowned as “Bright Lights.” You want to see what he’s got, and you are looking for a great piece of art to grow out of a moment that changed your country, your world forever. Is it his latest novel, “The Good Life”?

Well, for starters, it isn’t written in the second person so we can drop all that.

McInerney’s polished prose offers a tangy bite of the city that is its own country —New York City — on the verge, through and after cataclysm in the lives of a few upper-income characters. He presents facets of “the good life” but turns back and forth between the straight and the satiric. The planes, as in life, shift uncertainly.

We meet hard-working, up-and-coming Corrine Calloway, her husband, Russell, and their angelic twins, Storey and Jeremy, living in a trendy loft, entertaining smart friends and making their way in publishing and a robotic marriage. On the surface, this is a piece of the good life, straight out of a lifestyle magazine. As Corrine tells her sister from Los Angeles about New York, “I think there’s just as much phoniness here… it’s just not as formulaic.”

On a slightly different pitch we meet Luke and Sasha McGavock and their daughter ,Ashley, the family slightly older, slightly higher on the food chain, more glamorous, more jaded; Sasha and Ashley higher on drugs, more wanton in their relationships with men and boys. They appear to live an even better life but, closer up, it is even emptier, more corrupt than the Calloways.

And then it is Sept. 11, 2001, and the good life is interrupted for all.

Luke changes a breakfast appointment and leaves a good friend sitting alone at their table in Windows on the World. When the towers fall, the elegant socialite rushes in, just another stunned volunteer, digging through the rubble with his hands, later passing makeshift body bags up an improvised bucket brigade until professionals arrive to take over. After hours at Ground Zero, he wanders out, covered with and blinded by the peculiar dust of the site, and stumbles into the arms of Corrine Galloway. From this fateful meeting a friendship grows and then a romance as they labor at a relief station for Ground Zero workers in the following weeks. They come to believe that this is the good life, not their former picture-perfect lives, mere thin candy shells covering personal corruption. “Luke began to wonder if whatever good he was doing downtown was morally canceled out by the pleasure he derived from being there.” They prepare to leave their families and old lives for something new and, they believe, better.

McInerney sprinkles this novel with delicious morsels from the still high-flying lives of the ultra-rich and ultra-shallow. A socialite gushes to Corrine: “I was at Minky Rijstaefal’s for dinner — you know Minky; her husband’s Tom Harwell, the plastic surgeon — and it was so sweet: Folded inside the name cards at the table, we all had prescriptions for Cipro (the purported antidote for Anthrax, feared as a bioterroristic threat in the post 9/11 period).”

Or he describes posh decorating choices, post 9/11: “Casey had recently had the place redecorated by the hottest new design team in a kind of deluxe Early American folk style, selling off all their eighteenth-century French furniture, seventeenth-century Flemish art, Chinese porcelain, silk damask, and Persian carpets… ‘We wanted it to be homey. Little did we know how appropriate that would turn out to be. Given what’s happened, I think ostentation is over.’ She looked around, admiring her new living room.”

The novel ends with a jarring sacrifice — or sensible resolution — depending on the values of the reader. Those values will also determine for the reader which character pays the sacrificial price, if any.

A theme played deftly in this work is that of the enormous sureness of purpose that arises from disaster and the goodness of life that ensues. Whether in the dust of Ground Zero or the wreckage of Hallam, Neb., there is a satisfaction in the clarity of disaster work that leaves a vacuum in its wake.

In “The Good Life,” Corrine tells the man who organized the relief station where she worked with Luke McGavock, as it is closing permanently, “It’s a wonderful thing you did here… You should be proud.” “Then why do I feel so empty?” he replies.

Life is never as sharp or as easy again, and there’s a certain guilt in that satisfaction. That seems to be another of McInerney’s peculiar definitions of a good life that briefly followed September 2001.

This isn’t the great piece of post 9/11 art that the world is waiting for. Perhaps there won’t be any or perhaps it will not come from this side of the event. But it is a good novel, and McInerney is worth reading.

 Kandra Hahn has degrees in English and business and has worked as a reporter, a public servant, in publishing and nearly always in some way as a writer.