home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Time - Man of the Year
/
Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso
/
moy
/
060192
/
06019943.000
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1992-09-10
|
4KB
|
89 lines
REVIEWS, Page 82BOOKSOnward And Yupward
By JOHN SKOW
TITLE: Brightness Falls
AUTHOR: Jay McInerney
PUBLISHER: Knopf; 416 pages; $23
THE BOTTOM LINE: McInerney fulfills his early promise with
a funny, grownup portrait of a Lost Generation of the '80s.
The very young give offense by displaying frontal lobes as
unwrinkled as their rosy cheeks; and in his first novels, Jay
McInerney, the very young author, wrote chapters that seemed a
little too cute and a little too easy. Bright Lights, Big City
tried hard for the "God, how that boy can write" award once
owned by Scott Fitzgerald, but McInerney's next two books,
Ransom and Story of My Life, had little to offer except
boyishness and a good ear for dialogue. A few scenes of cocaine
snorting, the names of a couple of trendy clubs, a little easy
listening -- that's all it took.
Now, perhaps just in time to join the adults before the
big door clicks shut in his face, McInerney, 37, appears with
an entirely grownup novel about the end of the '80s. It's a
funny, self-mocking, sometimes brilliant portrait of Manhattan's
young literary and Wall Street crowd, our latest Lost
Generation. If it's not quite Tender Is the Night, neither,
cold-eyed readers will recall, was Tender Is the Night.
Russell and Corrine Calloway are young, bright and, like
everyone they know, on the way up. He's a successful editor for
a good publishing house, and she, somewhat less
enthusiastically, is a stockbroker. As the first married of
their pack of friends, the Calloways are frequent hosts to a
semipermanent, citywide party. Guests are still young enough to
remember when going to work with a hangover was fun, and most
of them are old enough to have outgrown cocaine, or at least to
have resolved to limit serious drugs to weekends and saint's
days. But when Jeff, Russell's star first novelist, arrives at
a bash with a 19-year-old model and a heroin habit, eyebrows are
raised. Middle age is still a laughable rumor, but in a distant
and abstract way, doom is understood to exist.
Part of the novel's fun is the flip, slightly unreal
dialogue the characters toss back and forth. Corrine, who has
a crush on Jeff, asks why he won't talk seriously about his
feelings. He answers, "Basically, I think men talk to women so
they can sleep with them, and women sleep with men so they can
talk with them." A nonwriting author of great reputation is
described as "Henry James with bowel movements." Social
gradations are precisely noted, and the level of smart-alecky
prose is satisfactorily high, although there are lapses.
McInerney uses amuletic and quotidian in the same herniated
sentence, and calls three different women "raccoon-eyed," which
sounds like something Philip Marlowe said while ducking bullets.
McInerney's version of Vanity Fair brings to mind The
Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), Tom Wolfe's memorably caustic
social novel of Manhattan's decay. The two books, however, don't
really resemble each other beyond their shared setting. Wolfe
despises his characters and creates them in order to hold them
up to ridicule, wriggling and in pain. McInerney cares deeply
about the silly, grasping, ego-swollen pipsqueaks -- fairly
decent, fairly normal people -- he invents. Wolfe's cold
contempt gives the reader distance, a panoramic view of an ant
colony. McInerney shows us human beings who feel wretched as
they behave badly.
And McInerney writes one of the most touching scenes in
recent fiction, far beyond bug-on-a-pin satire, when Jeff is
hospitalized in a sanatorium. After months of furious denial,
he befriends a broken young woman. She has hidden a shard of
glass, presumably to commit suicide. He finds it and, not far
from self-destruction himself, slices one of his fingers. He
sobs, not from hurt but from sudden comprehension of finality.
Unable to do more, she takes his finger and licks away the
blood. Brightness Falls, from an impressive height.