Brightness Falls

Is IT so many years ago already that Jay McInerney was one of a movement, or at least a trio, a brat pack of bright young writers? It is. For Bret Easton Ellis has proved himself to be a stupid brute, and Tama Janowitz, who for hundred-yard dashes was the best of the three, seems to have disappeared. Only McInerney remains.

Not that he hasn't had his problems. After Bright Lights, Big City devoured the world, the reviewers, who had helped it in its rampage, lay in wait for his next productions. They assailed Story of My Life--unfairly, since it was a harder book to pull off than Bright Lights, and McInerney had done it: the narrator of the earlier book was a rather winning young man, while the narrator of the later was an even younger girl, her head stuffed with cliches and garbage, and yet her story managed to be something other than an extended joke at her expense.

Brightness Falls, a more ambitious tale, has a hero and a heroine. Russell Calloway is an amiable young man with a tendency to be emotionally obtuse, who once thought he might be a poet, but who became instead the heir apparent at a prestigious publishing house where the crown-princely role has begun to irk him. His wife, the former Corrine Makepeace, is a bit of a masochist, which you'd have to be to love Russell as he is at the novel's beginning. She works on Wall Street, at the height of the money fever. We know, and she suspects, what is coming along about October 1987. The Calloways are headed for a crash of their own, brought on by "the tragedy of monogamy," which is "that passion cannot be sustained forever, though other compensations might replace it."

The backdrop ranges from the high life of mergers and acquisitions, which we sample when Russell decides to buy his own company, to the low life of bums, courtesy of Corrine's weekly stints at a soup kitchen. The minor characters who populate this spectrum are entertaining, even when melodramatic. The best is Victor Propp, one of Russell's authors, a classic Jewish depressive who is rather like Harold Brodkey, though his long awaited novel turns out to be more like Truman Capote's. Here is Propp, musing on the heady times:

No free lunch. Who said it first? . . . It had the pithy quality of a Ben Franklinism. But wasn't that really what it meant to be an American, to believe above all in the free lunch? Dialectically opposed to the Puritan ethic and every bit as firmly fixed in the national psyche was the bedrock belief in something for nothing, the idea that five would get you ten.... In a small notebook, Victor wrote Free Lunch . . . Manifest Destiny . . . American Mind.

Another vivid, if fantastic, supporting figure is Trina Cox, a young Wall Street predatress whom Russell enlists to mastermind his takeover bid, and who has the following interview with a tycoon.

She fought her way up out of the chair. "This trick peekaboo chair is bulls---, Bernie. You want to see my stuff? Be a man about it. You want to see it?" Trina lifted her skirt up over her hips . . . Shwing! Will Russell take over his publishing house? Will he take Trina? Will Trina take him? Turn the page.

McInerney has been writing about F. Scott Fitzgerald recently, and there are several references in Brightness Falls to The Great Gatsby. The comparison they invite strikes me as wrongheaded. Fitzgerald's best prose is allusive, while McInerney's is epigrammatic. Fitzgerald's subject was the pathos of illusions--their power to inspire, and their inevitable disappointment--while McInerney is at heart a moralist: if you behave or think badly, bad things will happen to you. (Fitzgerald moralized too, but not at his best.)

Two things tend to tug McInerney off course in this book. One is the urge to moralize on too grand a scale. His political and social judgments lack the necessary emotional and intellectual gravity, which he tries to make up for with research, a la Tom Wolfe. It didn't work for Wolfe either, at least not in this way. I was amused to note that two of the Wall Street insiders mentioned in McInerney's "Acknowledgments" were people I had interviewed for the Wall Street chapter of The Way of the WASP. Next stop for McInerney is an essay in Harper's, explaining how Zola himself went down into the coal mines.

A more serious temptation is the implication that the woes of the world are inevitable. So they are, in the aggregate. But particular woes may not be inevitable at all. If "the tragedy of monogamy" comes to everyone, does messing up your marriage? There are times in Brightness Falls when McInerney writes as if he thinks so. The title, to take another example, comes from a line of Thomas Nashe's "A Litany in Time of Plague," recited at the funeral of a minor character who awkwardly becomes a major one in the homestretch. But the young man dies, not from plague, but because he prowled around Alphabet City, sticking needles into his arms. Moralists should be made of tougher stuff.