Jay McInerney’s “Bright, Precious Days” - A Review

“Bright, Precious Days” is Jay Mcinerney's latest brash paean to a manic New York existence. Serving as the final installment in his "middle age malaise" trilogy, McInerney introduces us to a Manhattan couple in a desperate search of hyper-vigilant self-worth and their place in the world during historical tragedy.

In 1992s “Darkness Falls,” it was the market buyout frenzy of the late 1980s; in 2006s rather underwhelming “The Good Life,” it was the immediate impact of 9/11. “Bright, Precious Days” now follows these same characters into the 2008 financial debacle.

With “Bright, Precious Days,” it's obvious McInerney has never left the decade that was (and remains) so good to him. It's a far cry from his 1984 flash, glam and substance-imbued debut “Bright Lights, Big City,” yet serves as an earnest, almost slickly evocative attempt to close out his decades-spanning narrative - this time involving the affluent Calloway couple.

But all isn't wine and roses.

Despite sporadic output, McInerney remains for the most part a master of his craft who based “Bright Lights, Big City” on his own early 1980s substance-addled lifestyle. But, like McInerney's characters in this trilogy, the modern world has restrained him into a more somber chronicler of professional-class languor, more and more so with each installment. Gone are the signature pleasures of descriptive New York affluence and replaced with the lackadaisical observations of a bored spectator in desperate need to be doing or writing anything else at the moment.

Nonetheless, the book still manage to dazzle.

I still prefer McInerney's 1980s novels (besides, “Bright Lights, Big City,” I also heartily recommend “Story of My Life” and the surreal “Ransom”), but at the heart of “Bright, Precious Days” is the smart, infectious narrative vigor that remains his greatest literary asset. It’s an appropriate requiem of sorts for a writing career sustained for decades by constant pseudo-satirical excursions into the moral, sometimes brazen foibles of Manhattan's sophisticated upper crust.