Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION MCI | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | FICTION MCI | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
From the best-selling author of Bright Lights, Big City: a sexy, vibrant, cross-generational New York story--a literary and commercial triumph of the highest order.
Even decades after their arrival, Corrine and Russell Calloway still feel as if they're living the dream that drew them to New York City in the first place: book parties or art openings one night and high-society events the next; jobs they care about (and in fact love); twin children whose birth was truly miraculous; a loft in TriBeCa and summers in the Hamptons. But all of this comes at a fiendish cost. Russell, an independent publisher, has superb cultural credentials yet minimal cash flow; as he navigates a business that requires, beyond astute literary judgment, constant financial improvisation, he encounters an audacious, potentially game-changing--or ruinous--opportunity. Meanwhile, instead of chasing personal gain in this incredibly wealthy city, Corrine devotes herself to helping feed its hungry poor, and she and her husband soon discover they're being priced out of the newly fashionable neighborhood they've called home for most of their adult lives, with their son and daughter caught in the balance.
Then Corrine's world is turned upside down when the man with whom she'd had an ill-fated affair in the wake of 9/11 suddenly reappears. As the novel unfolds across a period of stupendous change--including Obama's historic election and the global economic collapse he inherited--the Calloways will find themselves and their marriage tested more severely than they ever could have imagined.
Author Notes
Jay McInerney was born in 1955 in Hartford, Conn. and earned his B.A from Williams College in 1976. He did postgraduate study at Syracuse University, and was a Princeton in Asia fellow in 1977.
McInerney's career includes stints as a newspaper reporter, a textbook editor, and a fact checker for the New Yorker magazine. His writing has appeared in a variety of periodicals including Paris Review, Vogue, and Atlantic Monthly. His books include "Model Behavior," "The Last of the Savages," and "Bright Lights, Big City."
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
McInerney (The Good Life), in his first novel in nearly a decade, plunges again into the depths of married life in post-9/11 New York City. Hardworking parents to twins, Russell and Corrine Calloway are the embodiment of a strong relationship-the couple all their friends look to and envy. Russell, a respected editor for a small fiction publisher, pines for a bygone New York City full of energy and the vanguard of the global art scene, a way of life he tries to emulate at work and with his popular, old-fashioned dinner parties. Tired of her life of cocktail parties and charity benefits, Corrine left her high-powered corporate job in the wake of 9/11 to work for an organization feeding the poor. After reconnecting with an old fling, Corrine is thrown into a tailspin of dishonesty, betrayal, and emotional turmoil. Underpinning the main narrative is the story of Jeff, Russell's best friend from college, who dies tragically young, leaving a novel behind for Russell to edit and publish. Jeff's novel centers on a twisted love triangle-a fictionalized version of Jeff, Russell, and Corrine-and the wild days in gritty and glamorous 1980s New York. McInerney's tale is an astute examination of the ebbs and flows of a marriage in tumultuous times-coming to terms with unfinished relationships, the struggle to stay sane during chaotic events, and the strength to rebuild in a city ravaged by drugs, terrorism, and economic depression. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Russell and Corrine Calloway, the couple who anchored McInerney's Brightness Falls (1992), are seemingly thriving. Corrine's passionate post-9/11 affair, chronicled in The Good Life (2006), is over, and they navigate Manhattan's fevered social whirl as if they're born to it when, in truth, they can barely afford it. The unexpected return of Corrine's former lover forces her to question her happiness; meanwhile, book-publisher Russell struggles with the sense that the city is leaving him behind. He's always played for team Art and Love, but team Power and Money is on a winning streak. McInerney might recoil in horror to be called an old-fashioned novelist, but the author of Bright Lights, Big City (1984) has become one, in the best way. He chronicles both the social rituals and the changing times with a clear-eyed focus that other novelists have applied to Gilded Age New York and czarist Russia. Writing with full awareness of his characters' privilege, he has the restraint to not make them easy targets. In this powerful portrait of a marriage and a city in the shadow of the looming subprime mortgage crisis, McInerney observes the passage of life's seasons with aching and indelible clarity. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling, trend-spotting McInerney's continuation of his long-brewing New York City saga will pull in his many fans.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
I COULDN'T TELL whether or not I liked "Bright, Precious Days," the new novel by Jay McInerney, until about a third of the way through, when a passage convinced me he was foreshadowing a major character's death. It turned out I was both right and wrong: Several people die in this book, though the one I was anxious about makes it to the novel's subdued, exhausted, bittersweet end. But the way my inner reader had flinched, the way I had hoped I was mistaken - the way I cared - made me realize I'd been caught in the novel's slipstream. Or, to use a simile more appropriate to this author, it was like the moment you realize you're having fun at a party you previously thought was ho-hum, the drink, the conversation, the attractiveness of the company all kicking in at once. Reader, I liked it. "Bright, Precious Days" - so much better than its title - is a sequel to McInerney's "Brightness Falls" (1992) and "The Good Life" (2006), all three chronicling the lives, times and marriage of Russell and Corrine Calloway, a "golden" couple in their friends' eyes, like the great host and hostess of the Lost Generation, Gerald and Sara Murphy, but for TriBeCa and Sagaponack. (I realize the Murphys reference is a bit reflexive or even cheesy at this point in literary history, but it's made in the novel itself, by a writer for a "glossy giveaway" magazine in the Hamptons, so both McInerney and I are having our cliché and disavowing it too.) The new book sticks to familiar terrain for this novelist: ping-ponging between downtown and the Upper East Side, tracking self-indulgent, sometimes solipsistic Manhattanites of both the literary and financial species, so many characters getting out of elevators, cabs, Escalades and private planes that the author resorts to soignée verbs such as "debouche" and "decant." I myself hesitate to use the workhorse noun "trilogy," both because the three novels don't really form a coherent whole like, say, "The Hunger Games," and because I hope McInerney will someday come back to Russell and Corrine and their overlapping circles of friends, colleagues, family and lovers, although I'm nervous about what might prompt him to, given that the first book climaxes with the stock market crash of 1987, the second takes place just before and after 9/11 and the new one staggers through the 2008 Wall Street meltdown. If a decade from now McInerney tackles another installment, perhaps (knock wood) it will address the challenges of writing narrative against a dull, non-tumultuous historical backdrop. Not likely, though, the way events are going. There is a line from "Coriolanus" that pops up more than once in these novels: "When the sea was calm, all boats alike/Show'd mastership in floating." Of course, the sea has not been calm, not for the city and not for McInerney's golden couple. Their C.V.s: Russell (Crash) Calloway, still boyish in middle age, passionate, impulsive, physically and emotionally clumsy (hence his nickname), is now head of a small, venerable publishing house. Corrine Calloway, nee Makepeace, a former prep-school goddess, levelheaded, compassionate, given to conversational non sequiturs, has worked variously as a stockbroker, screenwriter, 9/11 volunteer and head of a food charity. They met at Brown (of course), and their marriage has endured affairs on both sides of the ledger, career mishaps, cash-flow problems, infertility and, finally, parenthood of now-11-year-old twins, a boy and girl. As McInerney puts it, picking up Shakespeare's metaphor with the Calloways now entering their 50s (and the narrative picking up in the fall of 2006): "Their marriage was seaworthy, if not exactly buoyant Better off, surely, than the republic, bulging at the waist and spiritually enervated, fighting two wars and a midterm election, all of which seemed endless." Endless, indeed - a sad little inside joke for those of us still clinging to the wreckage in 2016. McInerney's multivolume, not-so-distant historical fiction can't help recalling John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom books or Philip Roth's second Zuckerman trilogy -"American Pastoral," "I Married a Communist" and "The Human Stain." McInerney doesn't reach the artistry and insight of those two - few do - and his novels aren't quite as showily entertaining as Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities," but the Calloway books share strengths with all those works, as well as an underlying generosity of spirit that is McInerney's own. The moral arc of his universe bends toward forgiveness. The bad boys he's so fond of usually manage to wriggle out of the doghouse. But compassion and empathy don't dull a wicked sense of humor - his description, for instance, of a socialite at lunch poking at the "lozenge of chicken paillard on her plate," or his account of Russell and Corrine getting into bed after a bad night out at a pretentious tasting-menu restaurant ("I can't believe we were supposed to eat fish sperm !"), an evening further marred by a fight about their sex life in the cab home: "After returning from the bathroom, she undressed behind the closet door and emerged in full pajamas, a red cotton top and bottom that had never once been removed in the heat of passion, settled into her side of the bed with her book, Joan Didion's memoir about her husband's death - not necessarily a good sign. He could see from the tight set of her mouth that she was not likely to say anything, the silence settling around them like setting concrete." McInerney has long been celebrated as a social satirist, going back to 1984 and his nervy second-person debut, "Bright Lights, Big City," a Reagan-era coming-of-age novel set against a backdrop of magazine fact-checking and late nights fueled by "Bolivian marching powder." McInerney himself cut a pretty wide nightclub swath in the wake of early success, and in some ways he has spent his career both living up to that debut and living down his subsequent notoriety. He's embracing it all here. "Bright, Precious Days" isn't just his third novel with the word "bright" in the title: Its cover echoes the iconic original paperback of "Bright Lights, Big City," with the Odeon restaurant's orange neon sign slashing across the cover's left side; on the right, where the first book had the twin towers, the new novel has the blue 9/11 memorial beacons shining into a night sky - a visual sequel, or maybe just branding. I don't want to delve too deeply into the new book's plot, because I hate spoilers, and I don't think summarizing the narrative will give you much idea of the novel's strengths. Suffice it to say that publishing-world shenanigans ensue, involving writers young and old, and that a lover from Corrine's past resurfaces, threatening marital equilibrium. There are licit and illicit drugs, licit and illicit sex, bad behavior in bedrooms, in bathrooms and at book parties; someone, whom you may or may not suspect, turns out to be a part-time hooker - the full McInerney, though with his characters now well into middle age, cocaine has to share pride of place with Cialis. "Bright, Precious Days" can't really be read or discussed apart from its predecessors; it doesn't hold its own water. I came to think of it less as a sequel than as the latest season of one of the great TV dramas, like "The Sopranos" or "Mad Men" - slow to reveal its cards, inherently uneven, but confident that its audience has already invested enough time to take pleasure in the slow accretion of detail and the occasional narrative cul-de-sac that might irritate in less steady hands. If a TV series can now be called novelistic, it seems fair to call a novel TV-istic. I mean it as a high compliment: an art form of sustained intimacy. McInerney occasionally writes from a lofty, Balzacian height - "Once again it was the holiday season, that ceaseless cocktail party between Thanksgiving and New Year's, when the city dressed itself in Christmas colors and ... the compulsive acquisitiveness of the citizenry, directed outward into ritual gift giving, was transmuted into a virtue" - but anthropology isn't his strongest suit. What he has given us, after three books and across nearly 1,000 pages, is a portrait of a marriage in full, its strengths and weaknesses, its betrayals and compromises as vivid as you'll find in any medium. If a few of the plot thread s tie up a bit too neatly, Russell and Corrine crawl their way to the final pages believably chastened, credibly wiser, still conflicted, like all of us. Endurance, in the end, is McInerney's theme, for both marriage and city. Battered, bruised, we're still here, catching our breaths, holding on. A Manhattan marriage hits the rocky shoals of midlife crisis and professional ennui. BRUCE HANDY is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.
Library Journal Review
McInerney, whose late Eighties-set Brightness Falls and post 9/11-set The Good Life featured Manhattan couple Russell and Corinne Calloway, offers a rich cultural tapestry that moves the Calloways forward to the late aughts, with a few telling flashbacks to the years directly after college. Back then, as "young idealists, they'd followed their best instincts and based their lives on the premise that money couldn't buy happiness." Now, Russell is a struggling independent publisher, while Corrine runs a program that feeds the city's poor; loft life suddenly seems less than appealing, and the Calloways won't be able to afford private school tuition for their twins in the coming year. So Russell takes a pricey chance on a big memoir about captivity in the Middle East, which could sink his company if it fails, while Corrine allows herself to be drawn into a heated affair when the man with whom she had a post-9/11 fling suddenly reappears. A secret blurted out by Corinne's sister, Russell's troubles with a young fiction author, an affair between two married friends-all enrich a story name-droppingly full of details about time and place that slides smoothly to its conclusion. VERDICT Fun for readers of literary fiction and pop sagas alike. [See Prepub Alert, 2/8/16.]-Barbara Hoffert, -Library Journal © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 Once, not so very long ago, young men and women had come to the city because they loved books, because they wanted to write novels or short stories or even poems , or because they wanted to be associated with the production and distribution of those artifacts and with the people who created them. For those who haunted suburban libraries and provincial bookstores, Manhattan was the shining island of letters. New York, New York: It was right there on the title pages--the place from which the books and magazines emanated, home of all the publishers, the address of The New Yorker and The Paris Review , where Hemingway had punched O'Hara and Ginsberg seduced Kerouac, Hellman sued McCarthy and Mailer had punched everybody, where--or so they imagined--earnest editorial assistants and aspiring novelists smoked cigarettes in cafés while reciting Dylan Thomas, who'd taken his last breath in St. Vincent's Hospital after drinking seventeen whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern, which was still serving drinks to the tourists and the young litterateurs who flocked here to raise a glass to the memory of the Welsh bard. These dreamers were people of the book; they loved the sacred New York texts: The House of Mirth , Gatsby , Breakfast at Tiffany's et al., but also all the marginalia: the romance and the attendant mythology--the affairs and addictions, the feuds and fistfights. Like everyone else in their lousy high school, they'd read The Catcher in the Rye , but unlike everyone else they'd really felt it--it spoke to them in their own language--and they secretly conceived the ambition to one day move to New York and write a novel called Where the Ducks Go in Winter or maybe just The Ducks in Winter . Russell Calloway had been one of them, a suburban Michigander who had an epiphany after his ninth-grade teacher assigned Thomas's "Fern Hill" in honors English, who subsequently vowed to devote his life to poetry until A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man changed his religion to fiction. Russell went east to Brown, determined to acquire the skills to write the great American novel, but after reading Ulysses --which seemed to render most of what came afterward anticlimactic--and comparing his own fledgling stories with those written by his Brown classmate Jeff Pierce, he decided he was a more plausible Maxwell Perkins than a Fitzgerald or Hemingway. After a postgraduate year at Oxford he moved to the city and eventually landed a coveted position opening mail and answering the phone for legendary editor Harold Stone, in his leisure hours prowling the used bookstores along Fourth Avenue in the Village, haunting the bars at the Lion's Head and Elaine's, catching glimpses of graying literary lions at the front tables. And if the realities of urban life and the publishing business had sometimes bruised his romantic sensibilities, he never relinquished his vision of Manhattan as the mecca of American literature, or of himself as an acolyte, even a priest, of the written word. One delirious night a few months after he arrived in the city, he accompanied an invited guest to a Paris Review party in George Plimpton's town house, where he shot pool with Mailer and fended off the lisping advances of Truman Capote after snorting coke with him in the bathroom. Though the city after three decades seemed in many ways diminished from the capital of his youth, Russell Calloway had never quite fallen out of love with it, nor with his sense of his own place here. The backdrop of Manhattan, it seemed to him, gave every gesture an added grandeur, a metropolitan gravitas. Excerpted from Bright, Precious Things by Jay McInerney All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
