Brightness Falls

The strengths of McInerney's ( Bright Lights, Big City ) writing are easily evident: his lithe, sly sentences coil around contemporanea (things, people, New York City) with adroit wit, rhythm and shrewdness. Yet his fourth novel, a well-plotted generational portrait of a cadre of once-sweet, young, driven friends in Manhattan whose hopes and chances of success seem to be fading as the '80s totter to a close, is perhaps too intent on getting this message across to fully convince on the level of character. Corinne and Russell Calloway, the novel's focus, are married and awhirl in the nether end of limitless aspirations (he's an ebullient rising editor at a publishing house that resembles a cross between Atlantic Monthly Press and Farrar, Straus & Giroux; she's a good-hearted stockbroker). Their familiars include Jeff Pierce, a writer and addict who almost self-destructs; Washington Lee, a cynical, swashbuckling black book editor; Victor Propp, the literary genius whose fame rests on the fact that he can't finish his magnum opus; and eddying extras on the margins--shantytown dwellers, Upper East Side epigones, Wall Street savants. McInerney snares them all in a satirical chronicle that has decidedly tender moments. Still, skillful, light-handed mockery tends to outweigh tenderness: there simply seems more cause for it--and it's so deftly done. BOMC and QPB alternates; first serial to Esquire. (June)