This is the third instalment in what you might hope will prove to be a trilogy about the afflictions and anxieties of rarefied people living a rarefied life on the narrow island of Manhattan. In 1992, when Jay McInerney introduced Russell and Corrine Calloway in Brightness Falls, they represented a new social type known as yuppies (remember them?). Attractive, well educated, successful, they appeared to live a charmed life, an appearance that each novel challenged by means of a large social crisis and an extramarital affair that together tested their union. In Brightness Falls, that crisis was the stock market crash of 1987, the bursting of the leveraged buyout bubble. McInerney returned to the Calloways with The Good Life in 2006, his obligatory 9/11 novel. A terrorist attack was a far more problematic emblem for the travails of married life than a financial crisis, which is perhaps why McInerney has returned to safer, more familiar ground (as well as his trademark “brightness”) with Bright, Precious Days, in which the 2008 financial crisis, and some more affairs, test the Calloways yet again. To be sure, any couple might be tested by breaches of fiduciary trust, but there are also limits to human sympathy. It is surely time for the Calloways to pass the tests, and graduate.
In Brightness Falls, McInerney noted that their early happy marriage had sheltered the Calloways from certain brutal realities of the New York dating scene: “Like Scandinavians, they inhabited a hygienic welfare state the laws of which didn’t necessarily apply outside the realm.” In the new novel, that sense of insulation comes not from their happy marriage but from their wealth; 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. This latest instalment has very little plot to call its own – Russell is an editor with two hot writers, both of whom have drug problems and cause various kinds of carnage, while his company is endangered by the crisis. Meanwhile, Corrine has rekindled the affair with insanely wealthy and handsome Luke that drove the plot of The Good Life.
McInerney fills most of his pages less with story than with a kind of cultural indexing. We are introduced to Russell by learning that in the 1980s his first publishing job led to nights at Elaine’s and the Lion’s Head, as well as a Paris Review party at George Plimpton’s town house, “where he shot pool with Mailer and fended off the lisping advances of Truman Capote after snorting coke with him in the bathroom”. The name-dropping soon becomes the plumb line that measures the novel’s shallows. Plimpton, in particular, resurfaces with some regularity. McInerney describes the topography of wealthy New York with a familiarity that feels smug rather than welcoming: it’s social history as humblebrag. “It was a short, familiar drive down Sag Main. Russell liked to call it ‘Writers’ Row’, annotating the landmarks for newcomers,” begins one passage in which the reader is assigned the position of newcomer, the narrator a boastful tour guide. There is “the house John Irving used to live in, and, across the street, the shambling old place that had been Plimpton’s for many years, then the one Kurt Vonnegut still lived in … Russell loved being in the proximity of all this literary talent, which he felt almost compensated for the invasion he called the hedge funders behind the hedge rows.” All of which leaves the reader (sorry, “newcomer”) with the distinct impression that the person amused by calling it “Writer’s Row” and the “hedge funders behind the hedge rows” is the author.
When not cataloguing celebrities, the narrative is cataloguing the possessions and tastes of elite New Yorkers. The Rafanelli Zinfandel is “the perfect hamburger wine”. “They all observed certain sumptuary laws of the time and place,” McInerney notes, and then offers an inventory: Tom Ford sunglasses, Pucci dresses (purchased in Capri), the “Arne Jacobsen egg chair with its soft cinnamon leather by the southeast windows, and his vintage McIntosh sound system.” Observing that these are sumptuary laws does not transform a catalogue into satire. The humblebragging almost morphs into virtue-signalling, as if the novel were most contemporary in its performance of all the cynical modes du jour. “It wasn’t Luke’s fault that her grandfather had given all his money away, that she was stuck with memories of lost privilege and a sense of aesthetic judgment that bordered on snobbery.” The novel is full of such unconvincing repudiations of snobbery.
McInerney still knows how to write when he chooses. Manhattan without the twin towers is “altered like a familiar smile marred by missing teeth”. New York women order Cobb salads and then ask the waiter to hold all the fattening ingredients, leaving them with nothing but “water and fiber and the sweet smell of self-denial”. But there is far too much clumsy exposition, as when a friend tells Corrine: “As long as I can remember, she was a real problem. I mean, I grew up with you, I know your family,” which no doubt clarified things for her best friend of 40 years. And too much of the satire is focused on women’s weight in a way that is supposed to be social anthropology but comes across as invidious, as well as clumsy. “Casey lifted her by-no-means-chubby-arm … ” But then dialogue suddenly lurches into stiltedness: “Southern writers are almost always relegated to their own ghetto of exotic decadence,” someone announces at a dinner party. As Jack Lemmon once told Tony Curtis, nobody talks like that.
John Cheever, who wrote brilliantly about the same class of people as McInerney, once observed that Scott Fitzgerald’s “greatest innovation was to use social custom, clothing, overheard music, not as history but as an expression of his acute awareness of the meaning of his time”. That impulse is here, as well, but instead of offering us an acute awareness of the meaning of our time, McInerney’s book is like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines. For some, no doubt, that is the meaning of our time, but this is a novel that signals higher virtues, without evincing them.
• Bright, Precious Days by Jay McInerney (Bloomsbury, £18.99). To order a copy for £15.57, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
