Customer Reviews

Brightness Falls

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

One can stand at a distance and criticize this novel as a tale of two self-absorbed yuppies, or one can come closer and actually read the book and find that it's not so easy to dismiss. Corinne and Russell are very real people, and McInerney does an excellent job fleshing them out. I sympathized with Corinne, a true lost soul who feels helpless as her husband's drive to succeed starts to change him, and also felt as indignant as Russell for the way he was being treated by his superior at the publishing company. All along the way, I felt dread in the pit of my stomach as to what would happen with Russell's attempt to takeover the company, but since McInerney sets the novel in the months right before the Stock Market Crash of 1987, that dread is most likely intentional.

This is the third McInerney novel I've read, and I can now say that I am a fan. "Brightness Falls" is denser and more complex than "Bright Lights, Big City" and "Story of My Life" but it doesn't hit a false note. He conveys late 80s Manhattan perfectly, and juggles the myriad points of view like a pro.

Why this novel does not have "National Bestseller" emblazoned across the top surprises me. Perhaps in 1992, people just weren't in the mood to read a novel about 80s excess, feeling it was too soon. Their loss. Several years on, this novel holds up very well. Interesting that the book also somewhat mirrors the Manhattan of today, where finance is once again booming, real estate is over the top and many are living well. People live high, and there's no real sign of stopping. Will this new world of ugly luxury condos (face it, they're ugly), the vanishing arts frontier and dwindling middle class last forever, supplanting a vibrant city with a glossy, homogeneous veneer? It seems that way; nobody foresees an end to to this new gilded age. The hubris is thick in the air and brightness falls when people least expect it.

I read McInerney's early success Bright Lights, Big City nine years ago and was so impressed that I bought each subsequent book on sight. Disappointingly, the next two I read got increasingly trivial and depressing. Until BRIGHTNESS FALLS. I thought the title was an interesting comment on the success of his first novel and the downfall of his career since then. However, I was not prepared for the stylistic maastery and raw emotion that were to fill the over-400 pages I committed myself to read. It was an adventure to pick up the book each night, as new characters continued to emerge throughout. Some characters had a decided influence on the plot of the book, while others served to embellish the feelings and situations of a given character. Each chapter focusses on a new aspect of the story, though without seeming contrived to rotate through them all. In fact, this approach serves to embed the reader further in the feeling that the lives of the main characters are irreversibly entwined with the lives of all those they encounter. Though it may be trite to say that the book made me cry, it is true. The pure love and pain expressed in its final pages had me sobbing in my airline seat as I read the closing words, much to the embarrassment of the passengers around me. If you liked Bright Lights, Big City and have been waiting for the next great Jay McInerney book, this is it. Wait no longer.

I recall reading "Story of my life" and loving it, and this was McInerney follow-up book. No doubt about it - a far more ambitious project. Deeper characters, richer settings, more complex and intrincate story development and vocabulary. And I do not think McInerney got near enough literary credit for his switcharoo, for I think ths to be an admirable book. It still packs in the witticisms that were expected in a follow-up to a flippant tour de force such as Story of my Life, yet there is also far more depth to everything. And, again, I was a captive of McInerney's prose. Though not as easy to read, it is a still a delight. McInerney's writing is elegant and alive. The characters are all flawed and quite real, and the occasional stereotype allows the reader to feel somewhat smart in a book that otherwise woud possibly be too erudite and Oscar-Wildish for our century. In Story of my Life, McInerney was a musician that solo'd in a jazz bar and simply had fun. In Brightness Falls, he puts on the tux and directs a complete orchestra through a far more complex piece. He does an admirabe job. As far as I am concerned, Story of My Life and Brightness Falls represent his best 2 books to this day.

Set just before the 1987 stock market crash and taking its title from a macabre 17th century poem about the unavoidable ruination of youth, beauty, ambition and life itself, Jay Mcinerney's finest novel is the tale of a twenty-something married couple, Russell and Corrine, who live in New York City at the height of '80's excess and glamour. The man whose life forms the basis of this novel, Russell, is an aspiring writer who has shelved his ambitions and taken up work as a publisher, editing and pushing through other peoples' books. He is unhappy at his job, slightly bored in his marriage, and when the chance comes up to advance himself and become part-owner of a faltering publishing house, he seizes it....exactly days before the ruination the market collapse brings on. This is a novel of expertly appreciated manners and mores in Reagan's New York, augmented by a fabulously-sketched cast of characters, all moved along at a brisk pace by the power of Mcinerney writing in top form. Thus far this is the author's best novel and probably the greatest of all examinations of life among the upwardly-mobile in 1980's Manhattan.

Brightness Falls is a great American novel, which owes a great deal to F. Scott Fitzgerald and his Gatsby. At times, it seems as if McInerney wants to re-tell the Gatsby tale on Wall Street during the Crash of '87. McInerney's Nick Carraway is, after all, Crash Galloway. However, the meaning of this novel transcends this decade and its hideous "greed is good" mantra: it's not simply a "period piece." The story is about the mad pursuit of wealth, the shallowness of the great Faustian trade and the price paid in unintended consequences. The story replays time after time and has done so since Helen of Troy and it always will stand as a poignant, cyclical, cautionary tale about those with unfettered ambition blindly seeking wealth and power. For all the apparent allure and trappings of wealth in New York high society and in big business, Russell Galloway is engaged in a zero-sum game. The writing in this novel is exquisite: I know this is absolute heresy but, at times, McInerney out-Fitzgeralds Fitzgerald. The main characters are round, full, human, distinctive and complex: I found myself intrigued by all of them. The dialogue is witty, funny, honest, real and each character spoke with a distinctive voice. The story-line was unexpected, credible and ambitious in its scale. The final chapter is one of the great closes among 20th century, literary novels. Having worked for global corporations during this time, I was deeply impressed with how well McInerney captured the essence of the era and then rendered his depiction timeless. I really can't say enough about this truly great American novel as the greed, arrogance and quotidian materialism of the late '80s just keeps on re-playing in the 90's of the day trader and in this decade as hedge funds are about to free-fall below the zero-line in their forthcoming decadent, dizzying downside. I was moved by the closing allusions to redemption in this prophetic novel and the optimism inherent in the premise that salvation can be experienced even after epic catastrophe and transcend it through the beauty of love and forgiveness -- even as brightness falls from the air.

Jay McInerny should feel fortunate that he possesses the incredible gifts of prose that he does; this novel is otherwise artless, inconsequential, and dated. The books opens promisingly enough, introducing typically young, attractive New Yorkers...however, when things start to go bad for our heroes, one can almost hear McInerny screaming "ohhh woe is me". Clad in creative, fluid prose, the second half of this novel is nevertheless little more than an after-school special; McInerny imparts his audience with the benefit of his wisdom which, in this case, includes: we all grow old eventually, passion cannot last forever, there's always someone more beautiful, and gosh darnit be on the lookout for "the AIDS". McInerny has obviously found that no matter how decidedly he has tried to prolong his halcyon youth, the cliches of aging are inescapable. Still, after reading this novel, one can't help but feel that it is somewhat irresponsible for the author to be crying over his keyboard as such. McInerny does little to clothe these bemoaning 400+ pages in even the tiniest specks of objective optimism. The world apparently sucks for him, but boo hoo, don't charge 10 and change to bring us down too.

Approaching the book as an unattached story, it seems to work a little better. Despite their yawnish bugaboos (anorexia, depression, drug addiction), the characters play off as interesting and believable, if not a little too smart-alecky at times. If Russell Calloway is indeed our author, truly he still maintains some modicum of self-love, or at least an ample measure of trust in his skills of sarcastic repartee.

I found the read engaging, and finished it in about three days. It serves well as a call to arms for the under-30 set (to which I belong), warning us that no matter how firmly we believe that it is possible to live happily ever after, we all just become our parents in the end. Somehow, it's difficult to have sympathy for the soothsayer in this case.

Brightness Falls is Jay McInerney's best, hands down. While I loved his earlier books like Bright Lights Big City and Story of My Life, this is the book where McInerney shows us what he can do. BF is about a married 30-year old couple Russell and Corrine whom to their friends are as perfect as perfect can be, with their good looks, uncomplicated lives, and easy going natures. Underneath, they are also decent people who are sympathetic and all too human. Russell is drawn into the wild world of M&A sweeping through Manhattan on the eve of the 1987 stock market crash. Corrine balks but there's nothing she can do but stand by her man. Things go great and then bad quickly as we would expect. The plot is interesting but it's not the plot that gives this book its soul. It's the finely drawn characters and McInerney's ability to capture things just perfectly. There are passages which for sheer brilliance I re-read just to savor them. McInerney can take a simple scene and render it so vividly you can see your own life and memories mirrored in it. For instance, there is one chapter in which Russell returns home to the midwest to visit his father, an aging breed of General Motors execs living out his twilight years in a pleasant suburb of Detroit. The complicated emotions McInerney teases out, the exchange between father and son, these are depicted so truthfully, I could feel my own heart twist and contort as I thought of visits to my own family. BF is an example of truly inspired and inspiring writing.

I read McInerney for one reason--his comical observation of the human condition. This book had it's comical moments but above all, it chronicals an era. It captures the the 1980's in an acutely sharp time lapse photograph. This book is unique by classical dramatic definitions--it is a tragedy, a history, and a marginal comdedy. A historical book of the same stature of any of the classical Greek Histories, but this isn't Greece Before Christ--It's 1980's, Metropolitan America. Procure this book. Read this book. Cherish it as I have, and put it on your shelf as a memoir of a time and place.

Like most people who came to this book, I was a big fan of Bright Lights Big City, which I found to have a fresh story told in a compelling manner with an ending that made the whole story salient. It was hard for me to admit that I disliked Brightness Falls so intensely, but after churning on it for a while, I undoubtedly do.

The overarching reason for my dislike is that the whole novel is so overwhelmingly hackneyed. The story is trite. Everything is so predictable and the characters are so one dimensional. There's the go-getting investment banker who corrupts. There's the corporate raider with the shortness complex who knows nothing of business other than just doing deals. There's the homeless guy who gets AIDS. There's the indulgent self-destructive writer who also gets AIDS. There's the mysterious genius writer who produces nothing. On top of it all, McInerney sprinkles in some worn-out jokes that my 75-year old uncle used to tell me 10-years before the novel was released. There is little originality in this book and everything is predictable within merely a few chapters. What you think will happen indeed does - and with no kickers to make it any more relevant. It becomes a tedious soap opera.

What makes the book even more of a chore is that the prose falls so flat. McInerney switches from 1st person to omniscient 3rd person when he needs to tell you how clever he thinks his observations are, but the problem is that most of his observations are banal and often trivial. And there is the prose itself that relies on so many predictable wordings. For example, whenever people kiss with romantic intent, a person always "slips some tongue". This wording was not even fresh in 1993 when it was published.

If you simply must read yet another story about a writer in New York, there are rows of other books more deserving of your time.

Last of the Savages was perhaps the best book on friendship I have read to date. Bright Lights, Big City was an honest tour de force that I read in a day. Hell, even Story of My Life was fraught with the sort of car accident quality that got it read in three days.

And here in Brightness Falls, Jay McInerney loses only a smidge of his page-turning quality. However, it seems that so much of the book is just left over anxiety of class struggle and obsession with cash and cache. The obligatory 1980s rehab scene and trite getting-clean-and-watching-the-sunset tableau is without the honesty that let it work in Mac's first novel.

It's a good read, but it's not all that and a bag of Cheetos. We'll see what Jay gives us when he lets go of the 80s.