Jay McInerney's eighth novel, Bright, Precious Days, is a sobering sketch of New York City on the eve of the Great Recession, through the eyes of Corinne and Russell Calloway--first seen in his novel Brightness Falls and again in The Good Life--whose midlife marriage is about to endure its own upheaval.
As the novel opens in 2006, the Manhattan the Calloways view from their TriBeCa loft has become for them and their upper-middle-class friends "a collection of luxury brand and franchise outlets: Dubai on the Hudson." Attending the occasional charity gala or hosting an annual summer party at the home they rent in the Hamptons, they fret over how they can afford to purchase the apartment they inhabit when it's converted to a condo in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Each day at work they confront the specter of financial failure.
McInerney offers a convincing portrayal of the ennui that afflicts some marriages in their third decade. But for the Calloways, who've been a couple since their college days at Brown, that malaise seems to arise as much from the sense they'll always have their noses pressed against the glass of the glamorous world spread before them as it does from the nagging frictions that occasionally threaten to undermine even the strongest, lasting relationship.
Since the publication of Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney has served as a kind of cultural anthropologist, reporting on the tribal rituals of a certain slice of New York life. Readers eager for the report of his latest expedition will find Bright, Precious Days more than satisfying. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer