Brightness Falls
McInerney, Jay
offered instruction to a French Catholic boy scout whose troop was named after Schweitzer: Don't choose to make your life into something great. Make your life good and true. Maintain your...
...McInerney is frequently taken to task for being a failed satirist...
...Russell hooks up with an LBO shark named Bernie Melman, who orchestrates the takeover...
...Corinne finds out and stalks off to Stockbridge and Mom...
...But if you are going to spend some time with these people, you might as well know that they are fatuous, glib, silly, and to frost it all, romanticized in their prerogatives of alma mater, brand name, neighborhood, and noblesse...
...What to do...
...beached whales at Southampton...
...Russell and Corinne get back together: "sympathetic haute bourgeois characters who clench in a reconciliatory embrace," as McInerney himself once sneeringly remarked of the type of ending readers seem to want...
...Stick to the idea of always doing whatever is consistent with the spirit of children of God...
...volunteers at a homeless shelter...
...His boss won't chat at the urinal...
...McInerney has been the recipient of plenty of jealous rage, much of it from people whose gut tightens at the very mention of the baby boomer/jobsfkids/good life thing...
...He susses the fact that the company owns its building, has a textbook subsidiary, and—"like Exxon"—is undervalued...
...The Tangerine-Flake characters...
...What fun...
...The callow ways of the Calloways are those of their generation, one in which stability and freedom, apathy and yearning, sprezzatura and ambition vie with each other...
...71 ter an ethnically English name...
...Her recurrent bulimia flares up...
...She loses a baby...
...Jeff dies of AIDS...
...A mere shell of my former bomb," she retorts...
...I mean this more as observation than a criticism, but you've been warned...
...71 The American Spectator December 1992 65...
...He is a master at takinga piece of information—for instance that Pat Buckley owns King Charles Spaniels—and dramatizing it, in this case in an encounter between Bernie Melman and an Upper East Side matron walking said dogs...
...Russell has forsaken writerly ambitions for the security of the publishing house Corbin, Dern, where he made a name for himself by discovering his best friend, Jeff Pierce...
...Russell pushes away his best friend, too, keeping his scheme a secret...
...He is a roman-tic...
...But the book's most telling moment comes when bought-out boss Harold Stone rages, "Can you believe what Calloway said to me this afternoon...
...The kitchen, it appears, is "not really intended for serious employment, but rather, it seemed, for the three-a.m...
...scrambling of a few Eggs Benny Goodman after the Stork Club...
...The same can be applied to McInerney himself...
...What seems like satire is actually an ironic, Saki-esque whimsy—a trophy wife's rumored sex change is an example...
...Throughout, McInerney uses landmarks, legends, and random New Yorkiana to good advantage, taking us from the Racquet Club to the Russian Baths on Tenth Street, and manfully mentioning Cats...
...McInerney seems to have a chop-shop in his mind in which he knocks off the very coolest trait from each member of a vast acquaintanceship, creating customized Kandy-Kolored tangerine-flake streamline preppies with the very sleekest in lifestyles and cravings...
...Corinne is searching a bit...
...Ambivalent, sometimes ironic celebration, but celebration nonetheless...
...As Russell is drawn further into it they become more and more distant...
...Those Eggs Benny Goodman...
...This admirable collection of letters is a rich spiritual document of a life that few would envy but many would revere...
...Well...
...His books are too literary or too political...
...Russell's father was a GM exec and Russell grew up a comfortable suburbanite, if without the cachet that a bunch of nasty, selfish, uptight, disapproving, miserly, Philistine, alcoholic, smug—but, thank god, eccentric—New England relatives bestows...
...If McInerney had remembered The Third Man—in which a testy British military policeman reminds Joseph Cotten, "Calloway, not Callahan, I'm English, not Irish"—he might have avoided giving an ethnically Irish characRichard Lamb is a writer living in New York...
...Corinne doesn't want to do the publishing tycoon thing...
...I don't see why your goal should disappear as you grow older...
...Seek simplicity...
...As Lady Pansy Lamb—no relation, I fear—said of Brideshead Revisited, "Nobody was brilliant, beautiful, rich, and the owner of a wonderful house, though some were one or the other...
...Thinking that the Racquet Club is pink...
...They stop having sex...
...He says, 'Nothing personal.' I told him, `You better believe it's personal, you little c--ksucker...
...It is the opening of Brightness Falls, © 1992 by Bright Lights, Big City, Inc...
...Staying young doesn't mean having the soul of a child, it means having the soul of a child of God, the soul of a man trying to be a child of God, animated by the spirit of God...
...blue-haired widows at rehab centers...
...43 from an Old New England Family...
...McInerney almost manages to have his cake and eat it too, playing a page-turning plot so that the reactions of characters to events are much more important than the events themselves...
...And he wrote to a handicapped woman, "Do not quarrel with God, do not quarrel with man...
...The pages that usher in lionized older novelist Victor Propp and financial heresiarch Bernie Melman are great...
...This is essentially an old-fashioned novel, in the tradition of Thackeray and Balzac...
...Russell goes to the Frankfurt Book Fair and commits drunken adultery...
...But he has an undeniable efficiency and rightness of characterization...
...There's only one way out: a hostile takeover...
...True goodness is more mysterious these days than evil, and this book teaches one to honor that mystery...
...leave all incomprehensible things alone, seek only one thing: the growth of the spiritual person, so that you may achieve peace of mind, which is higher than all reason, and so that you may give people something of the spirit of peace...
...She has tried law school, Sotheby's, and banking...
...But satirists are, on a. basic level, moralists, and McInerney is not primarily interested in morality...
...Russell is the protégé of editor Harold Stone, but is being rusticated...
...They have none of the heroic vulgarity of an unsympathetic character like Martin Amis's John Self...
...Russell isn't a careerist or anything, but it is 1987, and his career is going nowhere...
...McInerney catches the antagonism consummately well...
...You got it...
...Russell catches him shooting up in the bathroom at a party, and with family and friends stages 'an "intervention," packing Jeff off to a little place in Connecticut that used to specialize in Park Avenue drunks, but has broadened its horizons...
...McInerney has a sweet tooth where characters are concerned...
...You're still my blonde bombshell," says Russell...
...Before this is over I'm going to personally f--king demolish you...
...and really wants to teach...
...McInerney himself was "discovered" by his old Williams friend Gary Fisketjon...
...Russell, known as Crash, is a "Calloway from County Cork," by way of Boston and Detroit...
...Yet, just as the protagonist of Bright Lights, Big City says, "You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning," Jay McInerney is not that kind of writer...
...socially acute observers could read in [her] manner the secret code of American pedigree...
...He has asked her what she thinks of the Condrieu...
...One reason some mistake McInerney for a satirist is the uneasy interaction of his archaic—classical, if you prefer—disposition and the times he chronicles...
...The second half of the book contains some fairly wonderful writing about loss...
...Maintain your simplicity...
...Russell's unholy alliance with Melman the Conqueror appears to be working until October 1987, when the buzzbomb Dow kicked out and a lot of people in yellow ties found themselves in a free-fall, an ungentle glide that would scatter a priviBRIGHTNESS FALLS Jay McInerney Alfred A. Knopf /416 pages/$23 reviewed by RICHARD LAMB 64 The American Spectator December 1992 leged fragment of a generation over the landscape...
...Then he walks in on Stone in flagrante delicto with his editorial assistant—character No...
...Jeff and Russell see each other as alter egos, Jeff walking on the wild side, Russell nabbing the girl and the safe job...
...As he himself observes of Fitzgerald, McInerney is "a social historian, faithfully recording the passing moments of his own times, down to the names of fleetingly popular dances—a meticulous realism practiced at the service of his own romantic impulse to arrest the passage of time...
...To the extent that a glow of anomie pervades his work—and it doesn't, really—it is a reflection of the times he chronicles, and not an integral part of his vision...
...And yet the name is perfect...
...This is not satire, it is celebration...
...She's happy with their lives...
...She is lemoning the sole filets...
...it goes along with those relatives...
...In a recent essay he observes that Fitzgerald is "a realist in method, if not in sensibility...
...It is the reflection of these times in his work—and other things such as a preoccupation with the club scene—that has caused McInerney to be lumped with Bret Easton Ellis and Amaretto saleswoman Tama Janowitz as a writer of "anomic bombs," to use Terrence Rafferty's words...
...His techniques are those of realism, yet the result is something else entirely...
...There are extensive a clef elements here...
...It is her thirty-first birthday...
...Pierce has written a book of short stories about his eccentric Old New England Family...
...It can't be a surprise that McInerney has settled upon F. Scott Fitzgerald as his most congenial literary forbear...
...Fitzgerald, completely uninterested in modernism, was also lumped with writers he didn't resemble, or resembled only in subject matter...
...Panning a book because one doesn't like the characters is a contemptible, non-literary concern...
...As the deal takes shape, Russell Calloway's personal life falls apart...
...McInerney doesn't have Fitzgerald's talent for ineffable metaphor, his almost unconscious symbolist tendencies ("yellow cocktail music") and in place of them he seems to indulge in a glibness reminiscent of Noel Coward ("shell of my former bomb...
...It is his role as social historian that obscures his romanticism, for he lives, by his own description in "s--tty, depraved, and complacent times...
...Russell and Corinne Calloway are standing in the kitchen of their Upper East Side apartment...
...So is his irritating habit of contriving juxtapositions: homeless people at dinner parties...
...Corinne was "an erotic totem figure" at Brown...
...Just couldn't be better...
...But by this time Jeff is more interested in dope than friendship...
...Now he's really screwed...
Vol. 25 • December 1992 • No. 12
