Rating: 
Summary: McInerny bemoans his own disillusion; well-written
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: 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: Filleted Bananafish; Fiction for Rolling Stone -ahem-Readers
Review: McInerney -best known for his book "Bright Lights, Big City," a minor Eighties subclassic- its author popularized as a sort of wunderkind by Esquire (and himself) its product a novelty in the purest sense: taut, edgy, the brevity of the third-person's candidness outweighed only by the narrative's string of cliches and blurred observations: Here "victim" as a literal, albeit unjustifiable, outgrowth of Mr. Salinger's Holden found reification in between the perfume-scented ads for the appareil of Calvin and Ralph Lauren, the product less a critique than a contribution to the kultura: While with Holden what was once a cute, experiemental character of the Fifties, probably never intended to become an institution, the character/narrator here lives essentially for the eternal whine, a subject (or THE subject) reflected in the author's "Story of My Life" and "Ransom" (that character blaming the entire Japanese people for disliking him). Here, as with the previous books, the characters are essentially talentless persons, "causelss rebels" by way of New England colleges blaming the world -via NYC- for their fate, decisions and, well, overall existence: Never has there been an author more dependent upon having their characters identity so dependent upon the kultura; in part, I believe to legitimize their anger and purpose, in part also to legitimize the still less undistinguishable plot line of the author. Status sans public Standards. Focus on the particular as opposed to the possible, and voila, the presbyopic soap/thriller. The contant whine about most everything does find some resonance in the cliches of "Brightness" while never once allowing for the characters' demonstrating the skill or interest to really affect any precise changes. The geometry of this small cluster -Russell (editor/husband), Corrine(broker/wife), Jeff (writer/former lover) and company- neer actually do much by get by as "causeless rebels" who, as one japanese writer observed about more believeable characters who had still less, "accumulate what they don't need and pity themselves the burden." Those convinced this an Eighties document are sorely mistaken: To say the manufactured angst McI's characters are the tableau-raison product (or victim) of the Eighties is unsound for countless reasons and reflects as much a statistical as an intellecctuall cop-out on behalf of the author: The panic of the Dow at 2,000 after which Corinne quits her job not as a consequnce but a life style choice, the way in which R. treats the homeless, or the literal "shedding" of his alter ego, successful writer J. is hapless at best. McInerney, the physical age of the person, came of age long before the celebration of such motifs which he assures the reader affects the small orbit of characters who when not content correcting (some think it was "Brightness falls from the hair" he scolds his wife at the funeral), expends a tremedous amount (or overshematizing) in assuring us what a swell guy he is in showcasing the decor of the cluttered, if not insular, confines of his office. Reading their fate is something like watching one of those longish infomericals which make so much of so little of abs, gloss, eating dysfunctions or in general the manufactured insecurity of individualism once one transferring affection into anger toward others. One of the sad truths to reality -and to the dismay and pocketbooks of fictional writers- thatno matter how hard some would work to make others believe to be seen as "things" they really aren't. I'm sure he'll continue creating these figments, individuals who gorge themselves on nothingness (like Salinger's "Bananafish") without ever actually understanding one requires a certain amount of income to inconvenience themselves to the extent of either depriving others or complaining about how much they eat. Perhaps his follow-up would involve a writer-turned-vitamin salesman. Overall "Brightness," aside from its occasional excellent descriptive, is the world of collaged assemblage with no exact reference point or direction. In the past some liked to compare McI to Fitzgerald; this is something like comparing Rauschenberg to Vermeer.
Rating:
Summary: Beautifully written
Review: This is a beautifullly written book. A little slow to get started, but a nice more recent story than his other books. Nice snapshot of the era. Feels kind of dated now, with the Dow Jones at 11000.
Rating:
Summary: McInerney's best
Review: While the popular choice for McInerney's magnum opus might be BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY, I'll take BRIGHTNESS FALLS any day. BRIGHT LIGHTS is ambitiously written, with a style and story that challenge the reader, but there was no underlying truth revealed. It was more of a "day in the life" sort of novel. BRIGHTNESS FALLS, however, showcases McInereny's ability to conceive of sympathy inspiring characters, place them in interesting situations, and write about them in a style that does not let the reader put the book down. By the way, anyone who reads and isn't interested in the publishing business is an idiot. Not caring about how, why, and which books are published is like not caring whether they're burned or banned.
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