Rating: 
Summary: A Sumptious Read
Review: Compared to his previous novels, this one feels like a feast. The dialogue is witty and realistic, the situations are never boring, and the characters roam around you on the streets of New York. A perfect bedside book to feed your mind with.
Rating: 
Summary: Entertaining
Review: Given the tormented and tormenting reviews here, I expected this to be an unpleasant book to read. Instead, I found it rather interesting and engaging. Better plot than I remember /Ransom/ or /Bright Lights Big City/ having.
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining
Review: Given the tormented and tormenting reviews here, I expected this to be an unpleasant book to read. Instead, I found it rather interesting and engaging. Better plot than I remember /Ransom/ or /Bright Lights Big City/ having.
Rating:
Summary: an insightful book
Review: I felt that, in addition to a good story with well-developed characters, the book offered good insights into the realm of 1980s corporate finance practices and perceptions as well as offering what I consider to be a valid etiology of the eating disorder anorexia-nervosa. I would recommend this novel to anyone intersted in the areas of economics, finance, psychology, or to those who simply would like to be entertained for a few days.
Rating:
Summary: A book that perfectly captures the 80's zietgiest.
Review: I read McInerney for one reason--his comical observation of the human condition. This book had it's comical moments but above all, it chronicals an era. It captures the the 1980's in an acutely sharp time lapse photograph. This book is unique by classical dramatic definitions--it is a tragedy, a history, and a marginal comdedy. A historical book of the same stature of any of the classical Greek Histories, but this isn't Greece Before Christ--It's 1980's, Metropolitan America. Procure this book. Read this book. Cherish it as I have, and put it on your shelf as a memoir of a time and place.
Rating:
Summary: Brightness Falls, but McInerney is Reborn
Review: I read McInerney's early success Bright Lights, Big City nine years ago and was so impressed that I bought each subsequent book on sight. Disappointingly, the next two I read got increasingly trivial and depressing. Until BRIGHTNESS FALLS. I thought the title was an interesting comment on the success of his first novel and the downfall of his career since then. However, I was not prepared for the stylistic maastery and raw emotion that were to fill the over-400 pages I committed myself to read. It was an adventure to pick up the book each night, as new characters continued to emerge throughout. Some characters had a decided influence on the plot of the book, while others served to embellish the feelings and situations of a given character. Each chapter focusses on a new aspect of the story, though without seeming contrived to rotate through them all. In fact, this approach serves to embed the reader further in the feeling that the lives of the main characters are irreversibly entwined with the lives of all those they encounter. Though it may be trite to say that the book made me cry, it is true. The pure love and pain expressed in its final pages had me sobbing in my airline seat as I read the closing words, much to the embarrassment of the passengers around me. If you liked Bright Lights, Big City and have been waiting for the next great Jay McInerney book, this is it. Wait no longer.
Rating:
Summary: Haute Literature
Review: I recall reading "Story of my life" and loving it, and this was McInerney follow-up book. No doubt about it - a far more ambitious project. Deeper characters, richer settings, more complex and intrincate story development and vocabulary. And I do not think McInerney got near enough literary credit for his switcharoo, for I think ths to be an admirable book. It still packs in the witticisms that were expected in a follow-up to a flippant tour de force such as Story of my Life, yet there is also far more depth to everything. And, again, I was a captive of McInerney's prose. Though not as easy to read, it is a still a delight. McInerney's writing is elegant and alive. The characters are all flawed and quite real, and the occasional stereotype allows the reader to feel somewhat smart in a book that otherwise woud possibly be too erudite and Oscar-Wildish for our century. In Story of my Life, McInerney was a musician that solo'd in a jazz bar and simply had fun. In Brightness Falls, he puts on the tux and directs a complete orchestra through a far more complex piece. He does an admirabe job. As far as I am concerned, Story of My Life and Brightness Falls represent his best 2 books to this day.
Rating:
Summary: Haute Literature
Review: I recall reading "Story of my life" and loving it, and this was McInerney follow-up book. No doubt about it - a far more ambitious project. Deeper characters, richer settings, more complex and intrincate story development and vocabulary. And I do not think McInerney got near enough literary credit for his switcharoo, for I think ths to be an admirable book. It still packs in the witticisms that were expected in a follow-up to a flippant tour de force such as Story of my Life, yet there is also far more depth to everything. And, again, I was a captive of McInerney's prose. Though not as easy to read, it is a still a delight. McInerney's writing is elegant and alive. The characters are all flawed and quite real, and the occasional stereotype allows the reader to feel somewhat smart in a book that otherwise woud possibly be too erudite and Oscar-Wildish for our century. In Story of my Life, McInerney was a musician that solo'd in a jazz bar and simply had fun. In Brightness Falls, he puts on the tux and directs a complete orchestra through a far more complex piece. He does an admirabe job. As far as I am concerned, Story of My Life and Brightness Falls represent his best 2 books to this day.
Rating: 
Summary: McInerny bemoans his own disillusion; well-written
Review: Jay McInerny should feel fortunate that he possesses the incredible gifts of prose that he does; this novel is otherwise artless, inconsequential, and dated. The books opens promisingly enough, introducing typically young, attractive New Yorkers...however, when things start to go bad for our heroes, one can almost hear McInerny screaming "ohhh woe is me". Clad in creative, fluid prose, the second half of this novel is nevertheless little more than an after-school special; McInerny imparts his audience with the benefit of his wisdom which, in this case, includes: we all grow old eventually, passion cannot last forever, there's always someone more beautiful, and gosh darnit be on the lookout for "the AIDS". McInerny has obviously found that no matter how decidedly he has tried to prolong his halcyon youth, the cliches of aging are inescapable. Still, after reading this novel, one can't help but feel that it is somewhat irresponsible for the author to be crying over his keyboard as such. McInerny does little to clothe these bemoaning 400+ pages in even the tiniest specks of objective optimism. The world apparently sucks for him, but boo hoo, don't charge 10 and change to bring us down too.Approaching the book as an unattached story, it seems to work a little better. Despite their yawnish bugaboos (anorexia, depression, drug addiction), the characters play off as interesting and believable, if not a little too smart-alecky at times. If Russell Calloway is indeed our author, truly he still maintains some modicum of self-love, or at least an ample measure of trust in his skills of sarcastic repartee. I found the read engaging, and finished it in about three days. It serves well as a call to arms for the under-30 set (to which I belong), warning us that no matter how firmly we believe that it is possible to live happily ever after, we all just become our parents in the end. Somehow, it's difficult to have sympathy for the soothsayer in this case.
Rating:
Summary: Boilerplate McInerney, with some added pages this time
Review: Last of the Savages was perhaps the best book on friendship I have read to date. Bright Lights, Big City was an honest tour de force that I read in a day. Hell, even Story of My Life was fraught with the sort of car accident quality that got it read in three days. And here in Brightness Falls, Jay McInerney loses only a smidge of his page-turning quality. However, it seems that so much of the book is just left over anxiety of class struggle and obsession with cash and cache. The obligatory 1980s rehab scene and trite getting-clean-and-watching-the-sunset tableau is without the honesty that let it work in Mac's first novel. It's a good read, but it's not all that and a bag of Cheetos. We'll see what Jay gives us when he lets go of the 80s.
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