Product Description

he bestselling Brightness Falls--now in trade paper from the author of Bright Lights, Big City. In the story of Russell and Corrine Calloway, set against the world of New York publishing, McInerney provides a stunningly accomplished portrayal of people contending with early success, then getting lost in the middle of their lives.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #163147 in Books
• Published on: 1993-03-31
• Released on: 1993-03-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

From Publishers Weekly
While the strengths of McInerney's writing are in evidence, the characterizations in this well-plotted generational portrait of late-'80s Manhattan yuppies fail to convince. A BOMC alternate and a three-week PW bestseller in cloth. Author tour.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
The author of Bright Lights, Big City ( LJ 10/1/84) again offers an amusing and perceptive morality tale of Eighties excess. Russell Calloway, an editor for a major publishing house, and his stockbroker wife Corrine appear to be the perfect New York couple. Dissatisfied with the management of his publishing company, Russell organizes a hostile takeover bid and embarks on an affair with Trina, his investment banker. But he loses his shirt in the 1987 stock market crash, Corrine leaves him, and his best friend commits suicide. McInerney wryly examines the dilemma of people in their 30s who came of age with sex, drugs, and rock and roll and must now come to grips with adult responsibilities. Replete with ironic insight, wit, and style, this is highly recommended for popular fiction collections. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/92.
- Patricia Ross, Westerville P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
His own career very much a creation of 80's hype, McInerney here attempts an unironic post-mortem on the era of leveraged buyouts and consumer excess. Not surprisingly, it reads like an apologia pro vita sua, without any of the bite or wit of Bright Lights, Big City. Publishing insiders will no doubt find much of interest in the roman … clef aspects of this overwrought saga. Otherwise, it's a pretentious morality tale with all the depth and subtlety of Oliver Stone's Wall Street. ( Both Stone and McInerney thank businessman Ken Lipper for his insider's expertise.) The golden couple at the center of things are Corrine and Russell Calloway, handsome college sweethearts, whose cozy domesticity is envied by their swinging single friends. Though she's a stockbroker, Corrine also works in a soup kitchen and has a ``Mother Teresa syndrome,'' according to her husband. He's a Wunderkind editor at a distinguished publishing house but feels his career is being stymied by his mentor, Harold Stone, ``a former radical intellectual'' who now spends his lunch hour at the Four Seasons. Together with a street-smart, young black editor, Russell and an investment-banker friend plan a hostile takeover of his employer. They enlist the help of Bernie Melman, a short and pudgy corporate raider who eventually sells Russell down the river. So much for the intrigue. McInerney fills out his melodrama with hunks of undigested business chat; a textbook's worth of college-level literary quotations; and pathetic running jokes about exploding breast implants. The personal lives of the key players suffer from predictable problems: infidelity, alcoholism, anorexia, satyriasis, drug addiction, and depression. With all its soap-opera turns, it's hard to take this thirtysomethingish novel seriously. Despite its purple patches, McInerney's latest is more Krantz than Fitzgerald. And he can probably take that to the bank, no matter how much it wounds his literary credit. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Major literary novel on American hubris
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.

"Shivering at the dark threshold."
"Rich men, trust not in wealth,
Gold cannot buy you health;
Physic himself must fade,
All things to end are made.
The plague full swift goes by . . .

. . . Beauty is but a flower
Which wrinkles will devour.
Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair;
Dust hath closed Helen's eye.
I am sick, I must die" (pp. 412-13).

With a writing style that has been compared to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Waugh. Jay McInerney's (1955) love story, Brightness Falls (1992), tells the sobering morality tale of a "perfect" New York couple, Russell and Corrine Calloway, and the gradual disintegration of their marriage (along the lines of Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage). Russell is now a literary editor at a prominent downtown publishing house, and Corrine is an anorexic stockbroker with a "Mother Teresa syndrome" (she volunteers in a soup kitchen). Set in the mid-1980s, McInerney's novel takes on the politics of love, the tensions between love and sex, and how relationships can falter over time. At odds with his mentor (Harold Stone), Russell attempts a hostile takeover of his publishing company with the help of a corporate raider (Bernie Melman), while also pursuing an affair with his investment banker (Trina). Corrine leaves Russell after his scheme fails, but their relationship manages to survive. McInerney ends his literate, subtle, insightful novel on a poignant note with Russell contemplating (as Corrine nests and dozes on his shoulder) "that whatever plenty befalls them together or separately in the future, they will become more and more intimate with loss as the years accumulate, friends dying or slipping away undramatically into the crowded past, memory itself finally flickering and growing treacherous toward the end; knowing that even the children who may be in their future will eventually school them in the pain of growth and separation, as their own parents and mentors die off and leave them alone in the world, shivering at the dark threshold" (p. 416). McInerney's characters, Russell and Corrine, return in his 2006 novel, The Good Life. Highly recommended.

G. Merritt

Elegiac
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.