Nobody has a more exquisite appreciation than McInerney of the morbid, hypervigilant sensitivity we tend to harbor about our place in the world, especially when we’re feeling down ... the picture that emerges of a marriage that seems both more stable and lonelier than it has ever been, is quietly affecting ... Bright, Precious Days is mellow, earnest, almost elegiac. It is intelligent, and knowing in its depiction of certain segments of New York (especially the world of publishing), but, unlike his best-known novels, it’s rarely dazzling.
Bright, Precious Days can’t really be read or discussed apart from its predecessors; it doesn’t hold its own water. I came to think of it less as a sequel than as the latest season of one of the great TV dramas, like The Sopranos or Mad Men — slow to reveal its cards, inherently uneven, but confident that its audience has already invested enough time to take pleasure in the slow accretion of detail and the occasional narrative cul-de-sac that might irritate in less steady hands. If a TV series can now be called novelistic, it seems fair to call a novel TV-istic. I mean it as a high compliment: an art form of sustained intimacy.
And McInerney certainly hasn’t lost his impressive ability to tell a story, though the novel does get a little doughy around the middle. But despite his talent, the nagging feeling persists throughout that, save Russell, deep down most of these characters are narcissistic, empty vessels. And, cultural sightseeing aside, that means we have no real reason to care.
Bright, Precious Days takes a while to grab hold, and the midsection sags. But by the time you end it, you care about the characters — at least some of them. Whether you should is another, more unsettling, question ... There’s rich material, but too often, Mr. McInerney defaults to style. Yet he does write fluidly and rhythmically, piquing our curiosity with his inside dope ... So Mr. McInerney affirms he’s a master of the brittle and evanescent. But the dialogue doesn’t go anywhere, suggesting the author is content to revel in his own cleverness.
McInerney has long been a distinctly New York novelist, but Bright, Precious Days looks downright myopic in its focus on the rarefied concerns of a certain class of New Yorkers ... Still, as a social satirist, McInerney can be so spot-on that you want to call your housekeeper upstairs and read her some of the funny bits ... despite the dazzlingly smart style of McInerney’s prose, there’s a wavering tone in this novel, a sense that the author is still lusting after the very things he’s mocking.
In the past, McInerney has been compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Lofty claims, to be sure, but there is a certain affinity. Not in the quality of prose — McInerney lacks the lyrical sophistication, the gem-like glitter — but certainly in the veneration of wealth, status and personal gratification...[Russell, Corinne & co.] really are quite awful: selfish, shallow, disloyal and, like Fitzgerald’s bunch, remarkably careless. But the fact is, they are all the more fascinating for it.
...it’s never quite clear how detached [McInerney] is when he starts inhabiting Russell’s memory or recapitulating a pretentious young man’s hero-worshiping fatuousness ... revives the memory of Tom Wolfe’s social X-rays. (As with vintage Wolfe, when he’s writing about elite New Yorkers’ fetishes he knows whereof he speaks) ... Russell is both more comfortable with Corrine and more comfortable with this newer, more aggressive generation. He’s ready for a fourth installment. Dear Mr. McInerney, please write one.
...although he is ceaselessly ironic about money, McInerney’s novel still seems to inhabit an antiseptic space sterilised by its own laws. He has ensured that readers unfamiliar with the plots of the first two books will not be left adrift here, but too often McInerney’s outlines of previous stories read like the résumés they are ... McInerney describes the topography of wealthy New York with a familiarity that feels smug rather than welcoming: it’s social history as humblebrag ... McInerney still knows how to write when he chooses...But there is far too much clumsy exposition ... this is a novel that signals higher virtues, without evincing them.
...built into the DNA of this work is its explicit concerns being first-world problems. If you can accept that this upper-class, bourgeoisie couple is suffering real emotional turmoil during their many fly-fishing trips, flights on private planes and bouts of oral sex in bathrooms, then you’ll be fine. And it’s unfair to not engage with art on its own terms. McInerney crafts a glimpse into their lives with an air of authenticity and finds a universal truth there ... He knows his characters are broken, but he kind of loves them for that even while the book borders on satire. There’s always empathy, for the Calloways and especially for New York City, and that alone justifies the book's existence.
As in the previous novels, the author’s ambivalence about the accoutrements of affluence is palpable here as well ... do we need this book? In contrast to the jangled, frenetic first novel that made McInerney’s name in 1984 — the original source of all this brightness, Bright Lights, Big CityRead Full Review >>
Bright, Precious Days recapitulates the strongest and weakest aspects of Brightness Falls and The Good Life. Russell’s editorial activities are again a prompt for satire of familiar literary lore...Subplots about the infidelities and drug habits of those in the Calloways’ circle proliferate, and a couple of flashbacks to Corrine’s tryst with Jeff Pierce in the ’80s inject a needed bit of youthful juice ... willingness to dive toward the cliché as if it were Gatsby’s green light is a strange form of daring. History sometimes favors the least common denominator, and in this respect it may be on his side.
Status envy fuels nearly every sentence of Bright, Precious Days ... There is plenty more to Bright, Precious Days, some of it interesting, great masses of it flabby and cuttable ... Whatever else you could say about the young Jay McInerney, he was a damn good novelist. But it seems long past time to admit that, like his fictional avatar Russell Calloway, that early Jay McInerney is long gone, his place taken by an aging society wit, whose work, while never less than polished and professional, has lost its precious brightness.
McInerney created a likable couple — a rarity in modern fiction — and set them loose in his world ... Readers who don’t recognize Russell and Corrine, or haven’t checked in with McInerney in 30 years, will have no problem enjoying these Bright, Precious Days, either as a smart summer read or an invitation into the world of an underrated writer. The plot’s a bit thin but McInerney’s eye is sharper than ever. He’s onto something and he knows it.
The money and publishing world sections of Bright, Precious Days are compelling and well done — the best part of the novel. Not so much the other parts ... One problem is that McInerney doesn’t know how to write about people who aren’t part of Manhattan’s white elite ... McInerney’s work registers as mild comedy and feeble romance.
It is not a great book, nor, at times, a very likable one. But it does not lack for admirable qualities. A knowing send-up of liberal pieties, it’s also a wistful rumination on the fate of America’s great cities in an era when real estate is the new religion ... The book’s political chatter is platitude-laden, but it serves an important function, enabling McInerney to poke fun at the cosmopolitan liberals who make up his target audience.
Bright, Precious Days reads like a spiritual sequel to his Bright Lights, Big City, with that novel’s zeitgeist-defining narrator having found a measure of success and stability, but still viewing himself as young and on the cutting edge ... Bright doesn’t exactly mine uncharted territory, and the historical backdrop that comments on the action—the collapse of the old world, as seen by the 2008 financial crisis, the promise of what comes next, played by the 2008 election—feels more like grafted-on symbolism than organic or enlightening ... McInerney’s wit remains sharp, his powers of character observation astute, and he has more self-awareness than comes standard with the genre.
