Morality and mortality in Jay McInerney’s new novel

Eight years after the publication of 1984’s Bright Lights, Big City, that riotous and audacious first novel about a twenty-something man crashing and burning in the glittering streets and shadier corners of Manhattan, Jay McInerney broadened his scope and produced a multistranded, multivoiced work. Published in 1992, Brightness Falls documented the charmed lives of New York yuppie couple Russell and Corrine Calloway at the tail end of the 1980s. From the outside, they seemed a perfect double act: “Their friends viewed them as savvy pioneers of the matrimonial state” — a sharp contrast to the unnamed protagonist of McInerney’s debut, with his “marital Pearl Harbor.” But the Calloways’ marriage became strained, first when Russell got in over his head planning a hostile takeover, and then when he mixed business with carnal pleasure with his financial helper.  

So began the Calloway saga. Each successive book in what turned out to be a