This Side of Canal Street
EICHMAN, ERICH
This Side of Canal Street Brightness Falls By Jay McInerney Knopf. 420 pp. $23.00. Reviewed by Erich Eichman Former managing editor, the "New Criterion" Like F. Scott Fitzgerald before him,...
...Each one of these mini-stories could be the subject of a separate novel...
...When asked "Aren't you somebody...
...At the end of the book, a kind of bittersweet regret and sense of loss is evoked that does, at times, remind one of Fitzgerald...
...Given the deftness with which he is drawn, one hopes that McInerney in his next book will satirize the literary crowd he has spent so much time hobnobbing with the way David Lodge has satirized the academic world he inhabits...
...By far the most easily identifiable character is a Harold Brodkey-like novelist named Victor Propp...
...At a crucial moment in Brightness Falls, the editor-hero fears that he is "not serious, that while he shared their weaknesses, he lacked the gravitas of men" like his mentor at the publishing house...
...It is skillfully phrased, rhythmically appealing, vivid, and supple enough to depict a range of urban scenes and states of mind...
...He didn't belong at the big table...
...This character definitely does lack gravitas...
...It is still the Big City, full of mysteries, odd places, strange characters, and dramatic contrasts...
...We meet a randy, I-don't-take-no-shit black book editor, Harvard-educated, "fluent in several important languages," who must contend with an Al Sharpton-like activist clamoring for more black books...
...In the summer, he tells us, the city pulses with "heat devils of rumor, an increased susceptibility to soft entertainment and murder...
...He descends into drug addiction and has to be saved by concerned, guilt-ridden friends...
...For Fitzgerald fame came with This Side of Paradise, an ungainly novel about student revelry, social initiation and lost love in the early Jazz Age...
...It isn't...
...McInerney is clearly inspired by the urban theme...
...Even on the several occasions when McInerney manages to make the claustrophobia of the marriage convincing, it is difficult to care about the struggles of a 31-year-old protagonist who (as he admits) is emotionally a 19-year-old...
...An editorial lunch with this formidable (and not entirely ridiculous) author is the best scene in the book...
...We do not have far to look for the answer...
...Reviewed by Erich Eichman Former managing editor, the "New Criterion" Like F. Scott Fitzgerald before him, Jay McInerney scored an instant literary success...
...His prose in Brightness Falls is uniformly well-made...
...The book races unevenly from wounded intimacy to boardroom infighting to social burlesque...
...His pre-lunch morning is "devoted to the fashioning of a 33-word sentence fragment and six parenthetical phone calls...
...In addition, we are introduced to a tough-talking, beautiful female investment banker who "does deals," plays squash brilliantly and quotes Montaigne...
...with borrowed money...
...But wrongly so...
...McInerney's trendy, cocaine-buzzed milieu was far from the gentility of Fitzgerald' s Princeton...
...The longer it goes undelivered, the bigger his mystique grows, and the larger his demands for money...
...It is simply too much...
...While reading Brightness Falls, one frequently longs for the satirical edge Evelyn Waugh brought to his portrayal of the smart set of his day...
...He spoke of himself quirkily in the second person even as he recounted the latest drug binge...
...The pudgy financier resembles the loathsome Wall Street personalities regularly ridiculed in Spy magazine...
...The New York they inhabit has lost none of its dazzle, though, whatever pleasures they now have to forgo...
...He possessed real talent...
...Indeed, Bright Lights won enthusiastic praise from respected critics who might otherwise have cared very little about what goes on below Canal Street after dark...
...The new novel is, to begin with, a dra-ma of "troubled relationships...
...A variety of depressingly thin characters bounce from one thirtysomething cliche to another...
...There is too much facetiousness in his characters' conception of themselves to allow McInerney much ironic distance...
...The character-building experiences of youth, however, had changed in the intervening decades...
...Whatever McInerney's intentions, his near-burlesque scenes do not mix well with his relationship-melodramas...
...If McInerney is determined to dramatize genuine emotion and painful life-choices, he has to find more meaningful figures on whom to lavish his obvious literary gifts...
...Most notably, the dominant narrative line, the hero-editor's wobbly marriage, spirals downward through a series of crises that are the stuff of a thousand third-rate television scripts: the conflicts of a two-career marriage, monogamy's fading passion, her desire for children, his ambivalence, her anorexia, his adultery...
...In fact, the conversation in Brightness Falls is mostly of that smart-alecky, hipper-than-thou, overly self-assured kind one sometimes hears in pretentious movies and bad plays...
...There is, for example, a semiridiculous corporate raider, one of those "short, pudgy men with leverage" who always attract "tall, thin women with cleavage...
...A large part of Brightness Falls concerns people working uptown who are trying to act like grown-ups and make it professionally after having had their youthful fling...
...At one point, she stands up and exposes herself defiantly because she suspects the millionaire across from her is looking up her dress as she sits in a peekaboo office chair...
...Both books recorded the cynical self-education of their young protagonists...
...They don't seem to register with the young editor, or with the novelist who created him...
...With the appearance of Brightness Falls, therefore, the question remains whether we are to consider McInerney a writer fulfilling the promise of his first offering...
...A maze of subplots, meanwhile, merely produces a sense of discontinuity...
...Considered a master of the semicolon and a major mind, Propp nevertheless takes a "Jesuitical interest in the mechanics of power...
...He continues: "Escape was on the minds of most residents, but there was a certain caustic pleasure to be had in the melting streets...
...One need not mention Nick Carraway, Gatsby's narrator, to make the point...
...Midway through, a troupe of Wall Street wizards move center stage as the young editor's publishing house becomes the object of a takeover bid...
...What is worse, although McInerney takes his young professionals very seriously, they come off as unbearably smug ??”enamored of their own witty repartee...
...But he has yet to deliver the Great Manuscript...
...In any case, his star dimmed somewhat when Vintage brought out Ransom, his hitherto drawer-hidden novel about Japan, and (later) Story of My Life...
...Unfortunately, the gifts McInerney displays in descriptive passages are only rarely apparent elsewhere...
...at night married couples and the might-as-well-be-married lay on damp sheets as if precariously balanced, trying not to fall out of love...
...The viscous air seemed to super conduct sexual currents among a million steaming pedestrians, the blunt glances of languorously interested parties, like the days, lasting longer than in other seasons...
...She is not supposed to be taken lightly, yet she seems at times to have wandered in from a Judith Krantz novel...
...The appeal and pal-atability of Bright Lights, Big City rested heavily on the charm of its narrator-hero...
...He comes closest to satire with the Wall Street types who involve themselves in the takeover deal...
...The millionaire responds by agreeing to finance her latest takeover scheme...
...The title suggests a sadder-but-wiser companion piece to Bright Lights, Big City, and for good reason...
...There is a lot of this sort of thing...
...Why construct a serious novel around him...
...It records a turbulent year in the life of a young New York book editor whose marriage and friendships barely survive his domestic ennui, wandering lust and career ambition...
...And it is peppered with pseudo-learning...
...That passage is fairly representative of what McInerney is capable of...
...His own, it turns out...
...The editor-hero resembles McInerney's friend Gary Fisketjon, once of Random House, now at Knopf by way of Atlantic Monthly Press...
...In the secondary cast, we meet an esteemed senior editor who fights for control of the publishing house...
...But insights of that kind are uncommon and go by very quickly...
...he never would.' It is a telling observation...
...For all his fraudulence and amusing eccentricity, Propp is more substantial and interesting than the glib young professionals in Brightness Falls...
...The pre-publication excerpt in Esquire read much better than the whole book...
...It should be said that many of the characters in Brightness Falls appear to be modeled on real-life figures...
...He reappears later in the book only to flee nervously and mysteriously from a packed auditorium when the man who is to introduce his reading fails to show up...
...Here they all contend fitfully with the machinations of a hostile takeover, the glamour of New York socializing, and scenes from the distressed marriage...
...But satire doesn't seem possible...
...No amount of stylish writing can save such a creation from its essential insubstantiality...
...He represents an older, refined print culture and must be bested Oedipally by our hero if the younger print culture is to prevail...
...We are presumably meant to admire this brassy gesture, rather than find it embarrassingly absurd...
...Yet the mind it explored???belonging to a self-destructive party girl ??”was too shallow to sustain a long form...
...Both depicted a social world whose glamorous byways led away from happiness and serious work...
...The recognition may have placed a special (and unfair) burden on McIner-ney's next productions...
...Is the comparison with Fitzgerald justified beyond the two authors' quick success and busy, tabloid-chronicled personal lives...
...For McInerney the sensation was Bright Lights, Big City, a less ambitious novel about being a fact-checker at a stuffy middlebrow magazine (the New Yorker) and enjoying the desperate fun of Manhattan's downtown nightlife in the '80s...
...Asked by his wife why he is always in such a hurry, he replies: "Because at my rear I always hear time's fuel-injected, turbo-charged hearse hurrying near...
...And he betrayed, gradually, admirable feelings of self-disgust...
...It is also a record of financial derring-do...
...The last was actually something of a tour de force, a precise rendering of vulgar social detail and a faithful reproduction of semiarticulate youth-speech...
...McInerney seems to find it all pretty clever...
...He is forever being distracted from his own writing by the lure of sexual conquest...
...We spend a great deal of time, too, with a young, ironical fiction writer who is appalled by the success of his first book and apparently still in rebellion against his wasp family...
...Despite signs of plague, the thick reek of renegade lust was in the air...
...In Brightness Falls (as in life) he is presumed to be a genius and certainly believes himself to be one...
...Since the context of Bright Lights roughly resembled that of works by other young star-novelists and short-story writers of the early '80s (Tama Janowitz and Bret Easton Ellis, to name two), McInemey was enrolled with them in an unofficial literary Brat Pack...
...at a party, our hero replies: "I'm a self in the limited, Human sense...
...You're gut-sy," he says...
...He scribbles a few Big Thoughts on his way to the Sherry-Netherland, and once there quizzes his editor about marketing and the relative fame of other writers...
Vol. 75 • June 1992 • No. 7
