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Jay McInerney

Bright, Precious Days: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) Paperback – May 30, 2017

by Jay McInerney (Author)

4.0 798 ratings

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This unforgettable New York story of glamour, sex, ambition, and heartbreak begins in the heady days before the financial crash. Russell and Corrine Calloway seem to be living the dream: a calendar filled with high-society parties; jobs they care about and enjoy; twin children, a boy and a girl whose birth was truly miraculous; a loft in TriBeCa and summers in the Hamptons. But beneath the glossy surfaces, things are simmering. Russell, editor-in-chief of a boutique publisher, has cultural clout but is on the edge financially, and feels compelled to pursue an audacious—and potentially ruinous—opportunity. Meanwhile, Corrine’s world is turned upside down when the man with whom she’d had an ill-fated affair in the wake of 9/11 suddenly reappears, and the Calloways find themselves tested more severely than they ever could have imagined. The third book in McInerney’s celebrated Calloway trilogy, Bright, Precious Days is an aching, extraordinary portrait of a marriage during a period of dizzying change.

Print length

416 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Vintage
Publication date

May 30, 2017
Dimensions

5.2 x 0.85 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

1101972262
ISBN-13

978-1101972267
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“An art form of sustained intimacy. . . . A portrait of a marriage in full.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Our modern-day Fitzgerald.” —Vanity Fair

“Irresistible.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Quietly affecting. . . . Mellow, earnest, almost elegiac.” —The New Yorker

“McInerney is the writer who is funniest and most precise about the view from New York City.” —Harper’s

“McInerney delivers encounters and relationships, at times hilarious and exhilarating or excruciating between and among those individuals who are compelled to live nowhere else but on that tiny sliver of granite—Manhattan. Non-residents worldwide will enjoy the fates of these metropolitan dancers who wriggle, pop, squirm and sizzle under the searing red ray of McInerney’s magnifying glass.” —Dan Aykroyd

“In this powerful portrait of a marriage and a city in the shadow of the looming subprime mortgage crisis, McInerney observes the passage of life’s seasons with aching and indelible clarity.” —Booklist

About the Author

Jay McInerney is the author of seven previous novels, a collection of short stories and three collections of essays on wine. He lives in New York City and Bridgehampton, New York.

www.jaymcinerney.com
@jaymcinerney
facebook.com/jaymcinerneypage

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Once, not so very long ago, young men and women had come to the city because they loved books, because they wanted to write novels or short stories or even poems, or because they wanted to be associated with the production and distribution of those artifacts and with the people who created them. For those who haunted suburban libraries and provincial bookstores, Manhattan was the shining island of letters. New York, New York: It was right there on the title pages—the place from which the books and magazines emanated, home of all the publishers, the address of The New Yorker and The Paris Review, where Hemingway had punched O’Hara and Ginsberg seduced Kerouac, Hellman sued McCarthy and Mailer had punched everybody, where—or so they imagined—earnest editorial assistants and aspiring novelists smoked cigarettes in cafés while reciting Dylan Thomas, who’d taken his last breath in St. Vincent’s Hospital after drinking seventeen whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern, which was still serving drinks to the tourists and the young litterateurs who flocked here to raise a glass to the memory of the Welsh bard. These dreamers were people of the book; they loved the sacred New York texts: The House of Mirth, Gatsby, Breakfast at Tiffany’s et al., but also all the marginalia: the romance and the attendant mythology—the affairs and addictions, the feuds and fistfights. Like everyone else in their lousy high school, they’d read The Catcher in the Rye, but unlike everyone else they’d really felt it—it spoke to them in their own language—and they secretly conceived the ambition to one day move to New York and write a novel called Where the Ducks Go in Winter or maybe just The Ducks in Winter.

Russell Calloway had been one of them, a suburban Michigander who had an epiphany after his ninth-grade teacher assigned Thomas’s “Fern Hill” in honors English, who subsequently vowed to devote his life to poetry until A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man changed his religion to fiction. Russell went east to Brown, determined to acquire the skills to write the great American novel, but after reading Ulysses—which seemed to render most of what came afterward anticlimactic—and comparing his own fledgling stories with those written by his Brown classmate Jeff Pierce, he decided he was a more plausible Maxwell Perkins than a Fitzgerald or Hemingway. After a postgraduate year at Oxford he moved to the city and eventually landed a coveted position opening mail and answering the phone for legendary editor Harold Stone, in his leisure hours prowling the used bookstores along Fourth Avenue in the Village, haunting the bars at the Lion’s Head and Elaine’s, catching glimpses of graying literary lions at the front tables. And if the realities of urban life and the publishing business had sometimes bruised his romantic sensibilities, he never relinquished his vision of Manhattan as the mecca of American literature, or of himself as an acolyte, even a priest, of the written word. One delirious night a few months after he arrived in the city, he accompanied an invited guest to a Paris Review party in George Plimpton’s town house, where he shot pool with Mailer and fended off the lisping advances of Truman Capote after snorting coke with him in the bathroom.

Though the city after three decades seemed in many ways diminished from the capital of his youth, Russell Calloway had never quite fallen out of love with it, nor with his sense of his own place here. The backdrop of Manhattan, it seemed to him, gave every gesture an added grandeur, a metropolitan gravitas.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Reprint edition (May 30, 2017)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1101972262
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1101972267
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 0.85 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,705,095 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6,593 in Fiction Urban Life
- #21,185 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
- #70,383 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Jay McInerney

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Jay McInerney is the author of Bright Lights, Big City, Ransom, Story of My Life, Brightness Falls, The Last of the Savages, Model Behaviour, How It Ended and The Good Life. He lives in New York and Nashville.

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3rd installment in a 30-year trilogy: McInerney's soaring story of glamour, sex, ambition, heartbreak before the Crash of 07

Reviewed in the United States on August 6, 2017

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Jay McInerney's latest work of fiction is the third in his "Brightness" trilogy that started with 1992's "Brightness Falls."
His second offering of the trilogy, "The Good Life" (2006) was an achingly beautiful work of fiction, set primarily in lower Manhattan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

While I believed "Good Life" was a spectacular literary achievement (and probably the best work of fiction that framed the zeitgeist of New York in those months and few years after the attack), I was troubled by the flat, ambiguous ending, that had the charity-minded lovers Luke and Corrinne going back to their lives instead of remaining together as romantics united by their devotion to doing good during the turbulent -- what was the point of their affair, it if was just a temporary dalliance?

The third book in the series, "Bright, Precious Days" picks up years later, a story that leads up to the great financial crash of 2007 (and secondarily, the election of Barack Obama). BPD differs in structure from "Good Life" in the sense that the Big Event occurs at the end of the former, rather than at the beginning of the latter. While I find McInerney's plots generally a slow burn (I've read every one of his novels), I'm always dazzled by his narrative. As a stylist, the way he puts together a sentence is exquisitely beautiful. It has been said that McInerney viewed himself in the early days of his career as a Fitzgerald, I look at him as more of an Updike of modern-day Manhattan. His powers of observation are among the very best of fiction writers, and it is a joy to read his wordplay, his exceptional way of nailing a character type in three sentences, and the sparkling wit of his dialogue.

It's no secret that McInerney is no indifferent bystander chronicling the Zeitgeist. He obviously lives the life of Russell (although Russell is the head of a boutique publishing house, not a novelist), and admires the life of the Wall Streeters he invents, such as Luke McGivock, Corinne's lover. Occasionally, the narrative annoys the reader with its show-offy cataloguing of obscure wines ordered by obscenely wealthy Goldman guys at a private club (about 6 pages), their Upper West Side worldviews that have severe contempt for anyone outside their bubble (especially those from Tennessee like the writer Jack, or anyone in "a rusted out 700-series Volvo with faded GIVE PEACE A CHANCE bumper stickers").

That's a small complaint, though. The high-wire acrobatics of McInerney's prose is awe-inspiring, and he is likely the great stylist of his generation of writers. The book was worth a second reading to truly appreciate the philosophical musings of the author. BPD is, at its core, the story of four couples whose lives are intertwined. Virtually every character has cheated or will be cheating on his/her married partner -- McInerney asks us to contemplate: what does it mean? Much of the story is from 50-year-old Corinne's perspective, who is thrilled by the secret relationship she has with Luke, while knowing she's flirting with disaster on the domestic front.

The story has a melancholy soft landing that is evocative, philosophical and life-affirming. It is a fitting conclusion to a trilogy that literally spans three decades in its narrative arc. This is a compelling summer read, and the latest news is that AMAZON STUDIOS will be turning the trilogy into a mini-series. Here's how they describe it: "An unforgettable New York story of glamour, sex, ambition, and heartbreak begins in the heady days before the financial crash. Russell and Corrine Calloway seem to be living the dream. But beneath the glossy surfaces, things are simmering — and the Calloways find themselves tested more severely than they ever could have imagined."

4 people found this helpful

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temps_perdu

A Worthy Addition to his Remarkable Ouvre

Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2016

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Jay McInerney’s latest novel, “Bright, Precious Days”, is the third book he has written about Russell and Corrinne Calloway, two college sweethearts from Brown that married and tried to find their way in the literary and social world of New York City. Against the backdrop of the financial crisis, this installment finds them dealing with a number of crises attendant to hitting fifty with a solid but less-than-passionate marriage, professional disappointments and setbacks, and deteriorating personal finances. For a number of reasons, I think many of the reviewers so far have missed some of the beauty of the book.

One of McInerney’s greatest gifts is his ability to capture the zeitgeist of a place in time. The place always seems to be New York City – specifically, the New York City of the moneyed and artistic classes. While some reviewers have complained about the references to brand names or other indicia of wealth, I found that they enhanced the realism of the novel and rang true to the milieu of the period. I found his “ear” in this book to be spot-on. Of course, it should be. Mr. McInerney has lived his life among characters just like some of those in the book. I think he has captured their antics, anxieties and aspirations as well as any writer. In recounting Russell and Corinne’s (team “Art and Love”) struggle to try to raise two kids in downtown Manhattan while working in the publishing and the non-profit sectors, respectively, he illustrates just how difficult it has become for the “merely” upper-middle class to survive in a setting dominated by plutocrats (team “Money and Power”).

Furthermore, McInerney does a fine job of examining the desperation that can accompany entering into late-middle age. This realization of fading looks and prospects can hit the most attractive people disproportionately hard. Confronted with a sagging face (at least starting to sag!) and a sagging economic situation, Corinne resumes her affair of six years earlier, this time seriously considering making a jump to the wealthy new guy. Unfortunately McInerney does less than I would’ve liked to flesh out the character of Luke, her side piece. With his ADD, generally predictable life story and somewhat ludicrous romantic gestures, he isn’t cast in a particularly positive fashion. [spoiler alert: Of course, she doesn’t leave dear Russell for a one-dimensional cut-out, and I’d find it hard to believe any reader thought she would. Perhaps McInerney intentionally made it this way, but I would’ve liked to have seen a bit more subtlety to this character.]

The self-destructive artist characters all seemed out of central casting – perhaps because that’s how they really are in real life. Each comes off as the sensitive/intelligent/artistic/self-destructive drunk/drug addict that we’ve read about or met before. I would’ve preferred a bit more depth to any (or all) of them. Nevertheless, the portrayals of Russell and Corinne are truly nuanced, astute and sensitive. Perhaps the other characters were a bit more sketchy so that we focused our attentions and sympathies on the leading man and woman? I found myself honestly caring about what was going to happen next and how they were going to right the ship. In the end, I thought McInerney did a superb job in illustrating how marriages end up either enduring or blowing up, depending on the raw materials of the individual partners.

Overall, I feel that McInerney has done a wonderful job in portraying the world of literary and wealthy New York City in the period surrounding the financial crisis. He has always been and continues to be a sensational storyteller. Readers who are interested in this world or are a part of it, or who simply enjoy a well-told story, will be amply rewarded for taking the time to read this fine new book. It is a worthy addition to his remarkable ouvre. Bravo!

6 people found this helpful

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Captain Pike

A Welcome Return

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 1, 2017

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I'm reluctant to say that this novel represents a return to form after 'The Good Life', set in 2001, as I thought it was a perfectly good book. However, without the shadow of 9/11, 'Bright, Precious Days' has more room for the wit and social comedy that made the first book in this trilogy - 'Brightness Falls' so successful. By now, Russell and Corrine Calloway are in their early 50s and find themselves at a crossroads in their lives, both aware that there are fewer days ahead of them than behind.

This is a novel about change: the progress of relationships, the challenges of middle age and the continuing evolution of New York, as the economy waxes and wanes. McInerney writes with wit and compassion and I found the conclusion both satisfying and moving. I can only hope that there will be further visits to the Calloways, as I have become very attached to them.

This can be read as a stand alone novel, but I would strongly recommend reading 'Brightness Falls' and 'The Good Life' first.

3 people found this helpful

Marc Bigan

Somme toute j'ai passé un bon moment en compagnie de New Yorkais

Reviewed in France on September 25, 2016

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J'ai lu le livre ce week end, il n'y a pratiquement que des dialogues donc cela facilite la lecture. Ce livre est somme toute sympathique et on s'ennuie nettement moins qu'à la lecture du pavé "City On Fire" tellement mentionné l'an dernier comme étant l'oeuvre d'un talent prometteur etc..
Somme toute si vous etes seul un week end et que vous avez envie de vous trouver dans l'ambiance de New York sans vous payer un couteux voyage, ce livre vaut le coup.

2 people found this helpful

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Mark Ramsden

Dreadful Italics. Thanks, Knopf

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 14, 2017

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I'm halfway through this. The small ugly italics in the KIndle edition are extremely distracting. I wouldn't bother complaining usually but there are a lot of italics in this book, every few pages or so. Each emphasised word or book title looks horrible and it sometimes requires a little effort just to make out what the actual word is. Hardly the smooth, luxury ride these pampered Manhattanites would expect.

RD

... to it as all the critics said it was like a sequel to "Bright Lights

Reviewed in India on December 8, 2016

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I was looking forward to it as all the critics said it was like a sequel to "Bright Lights..." and "Brightness Falls" - two of my Favourite McInerney books. This, however, is anything but a book on par with those classics. He does occasionally write a great line or two, but it's very hard to care for these characters with their obsessions about NYC real estate prices. Quite a letdown.

bookworm

I was looking for so much more, from the ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 9, 2018

Verified Purchase

I was looking for so much more, from the return of Jay McInerney. Or it simply could be that I have grown up, unlike the characters in the book

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