“Bright Lights, Big City” is still contemporary. Clubs are not so important as they were for Tad Allagash, and money is tighter, but the romance of the upwardly mobile downward spiral remains.

Early versions of this story – “Sister Carrie” or “The Great Gatsby” – took a self-conscious seeker, a would-be actress or a tycoon, as their subject. The city only enabled their sin of pride; it gave the individual enough rope to hang himself.

By contrast, Jay McInerney’s hero in “The Good Life” (Alfred A. Knopf, 355 pages, $25) is unambitious. He wants to be a writer, but so does everybody. Reading the uncracked spines on his bookshelf, he remarks to himself (in the novel’s unstinting second-person address), “You must have had an ambitious youth.”

Mr. McInerney sees the city not as a temptation, but as a grind. Surprisingly, this makes his characters more imitable than the flame-outs of classic American literature. No one wants to be Jay Gatsby, because Gatsby sticks his neck out and dies. But anyone could live “Bright Lights, Big City.” You move here, drink too much, undergo some cynical alchemy, and blame it on the city. Mr. McInerney belongs to the grand tradition of moral transvaluation. He sees the glamour of hitting rock bottom. What could be more self-congratulatory than the opening chapter’s title of his debut novel: “It’s Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?”

“The Good Life” imagines a city where everyone – not just young newcomers – is damned by the city, and hypnotized by it. Their party days are repressed, but ambivalently. Faustian glamour has even gotten into their crockery; it is heavy, and made out of copper. Corinne, a screenwriter mother who first appeared in Mr. McInerney’s 30-something tale “Brightness Falls,” observes an old friend:

Then he’d finally stopped, cold turkey, and while he was a less unpredictable element, she missed the spark, the demonic gleam. …The lights grew dimmer as they hit their forties and some of the lights had been extinguished altogether.

But the lights brighten again, in a way, after September 11. At least people start drinking again.

“The Good Life” exploits September 11 as decently as any novel I have yet read. The implications of the “eleventh,” as it is called on the 12th, are realistically ironic. The city does not exactly come together: Some families contemplate an exodus, to New Canaan or to the Hamptons, and others escape into Ground Zero, volunteering and getting away from their creaky marriages. Asked if the tragedy has brought him closer to his wife, one volunteer shrugs. But there is plenty of camaraderie: Corrine is “flabbergasted” when her upstairs neighbor hugs her.

The downward spiral of “Bright Lights, Big City” is, for the middle-aged men and women of “The Good Life,” a holding pattern. September 11 gives them a chance to escape it. But they can’t go very far. Corinne falls in love with Luke, a financier who, prior to the attacks, quit his job in order to write a book about samurai movies:

She felt a strange pride in her new acquaintance, with whom she had a certain tribal sense of identity, affinities of background and education that weren’t supposed to matter anymore, at this leveling moment. But wanting Jerry and the cops and the ironworkers to like her or at least not dislike her or make her feel guilty of some kind of slumming, she wouldn’t dream of bringing certain of her friends around, and for that matter, she didn’t really feel like sharing the experience. But Luke didn’t seem to be blowing her cover.

Civic tragedy fails to obliterate elitism, but without elitism, Mr. McInerney implies, Luke and Corrine would not fall in love. Throughout his career, Mr. McInerney has ascribed a host of human flaws to a specifically New York ethos.

In “The Good Life,” he lets his characters step back and observe their city. Luke stands up when the Salvation Army band plays “Dixie” at its annual New Year’s Eve concert: The crisis has put him in touch with his roots. After September 11, everything is supposed to be about New York, but for Mr. McInerney’s characters everything continues, to their disappointment, to be about themselves.

Mr. McInerney does not meanly note the persistence of foibles in the face of tragedy. Rather, he sees how epoch-making tragedy – the big one – can fail to change the individual.

After September 11, several commentators wondered if literature would become less ironic. It has taken Jay McInerney, a writer of serviceable prose and flashy subject matter, to see the event as itself ironizing, contrasting the city’s collective self-consciousness with its disunity. He knows how the city can function as a big, unified metaphor, and he knows how to take it apart.