High Life

Brightness Falls.
by Jay Mcinerney.
Knopf. 416 pp. $23.00.

“You will have to learn everything all over again.” So goes the last line of Jay McInerney’s first, most entertaining novel, Bright Lights, Big City (1984). The sentence could almost be taken as McInerney’s own authorial program, since both he and his characters seem, in book after book, to be learning not exactly everything but the same thing all over again. And what do they learn? That the glittering allure of hip parties, fashionable clubs, naughty drugs—and, in Brightness Falls, his latest offering, big money—is really only superficial. That happiness is to be found in the simpler, human things of life—in love, kindness, honest work, fresh bread.

One might find McInerney’s seeming amnesia baffling—why is he unable to recall, from one book to the next, that he has already helped us see through the hollowness of the flashy milieu he depicts in such loving detail? But of course the forgetfulness serves a useful purpose, offering his readers a double set of thrills: they can lap up his savvy descriptions of the lifestyles of the hip and fashionable and still be left with a warm sentimental glow when the hero or heroine renounces all that jazz and on the final page affirms the primacy of the heart.

McInerney has been praised as a satirist, but he lacks the satirist’s penchant for exposing uncomfortable truths, for striking painfully close to the bone; our complacency is never threatened for a minute. “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning”: that is how Bright Lights, Big City begins, and even as its narrator keeps snorting coke, dancing the night away, and treating people badly, he assures us in his ruefully charming way that he is not the kind of guy who does any of those things. No, he is deeper than that:

You keep thinking that with practice you will eventually get the knack of enjoying superficial encounters, that you will stop looking for the universal solvent, stop grieving. . . . You ask yourself: How did I get here?

The answer, in this particular case, is that he got there because his wife left him and his mother died. Similarly, the narrator in Story of My Life (1988) got there—i.e., spends her life ingesting controlled substances and sleeping around and figuring out ways to cadge money out of people—because her parents never gave her any love and her father poisoned her favorite horse for the insurance money. But she too is a superior soul: she keeps telling us in between snorts how much she hates dishonesty in all its forms.

The same strategy is at work in Brightness Falls, which attempts to satirize the lives led by three successful New Yorkers in the 80’s while making the major characters themselves wholly sympathetic. The novel consists of one desperately manufactured disaster after another: a failed takeover attempt of an important New York publishing firm, a bout with anorexia, financial collapse, incarceration in a drug-rehabilitation clinic, a beached whale, infidelity, betrayal, separation, a street riot, a death from AIDS. All these events, which never manage to seem inevitable, are intended to have a larger significance as part of the impending collapse of our corrupt civilization: “For lately it seemed . . . that the horsemen of the apocalypse were saddling up, that something was coming to rip huge holes in the gaudy stage sets of Ronald McDonald Reaganland.” They are also meant to serve as backdrop for the moral struggle, such as it is, of the main characters.

Unfortunately none of these characters, good, bad, or in-between, is in the least compelling. If this novel is less charming than its predecessors—in fact it is strangely lifeless much of the time—that may be partly because it is narrated in the third person. The distinctive voices McInerney was able to create for the narrators in his other two New York novels at least made them vividly present to us, whereas all the main characters in Brightness Falls remain fatally indistinct. Tired and glib as is McInerney’s satire of ambitious young mergers-and-acquisitions specialists, Euro-trash party-hoppers, fashion models, and self-made billionaires on their second wives, his characterizations of them are positively sprightly next to his renderings of supposedly three-dimensional persons.

The strongest, deepest relationship in the novel is meant to be that between Russell, an up-and-coming book editor, and his stockbroker wife Corrinne, whose moral virtues McInerney insists on with particular heavy-handedness: not only does she brood at regular intervals about the plight of the unfortunate, and volunteer once a week at a mission for the homeless, but she also has deep feelings of ambivalence about her work—“Maybe there was something wrong with her, that she hadn’t been able to turn into an actual stockbroker with a stockbroker’s haircut and wardrobe and way of looking at the world”—and ends up befriending a pathetic widow whom she has prospected for business. Yet here she is, newly pregnant, talking with her husband:

God [he says], I’ve been such a jerk lately, haven’t I?

Maybe just a tiny bit of a jerk.

I’ve been a pig.

“But now you’re cured.” She giggled. “A cured pig. A ham, I guess that makes you.”

You’re going to be an extremely silly mother.

And so forth.

_____________

McInerney’s stated aim in Brightness Falls was to write “Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities with real people in it.” But there are neither real people nor real satire here. Tom Wolfe may not be enough of a savage moralist, à la Evelyn Waugh, to be a great satirist, but he is savage enough to skewer his characters’ pretensions with real glee. McInerney may simply be too happily at home in his world to summon up much gusto for skewering, and he seems to have no opposing vision of what ought to be, apart from a pious, half-hearted belief—maybe it is something someone told him once—that greed is a very bad thing and people should not care about status, riches, and success, but rather about the homeless, and being nice to their friends and spouses. If he expects to continue being a novelist, he will have to learn everything all over again.