Bright Precious Days

 

"I try so hard, just to fill your cup.  I try so hard just to fill it up."-Del Fuegos "I Still Want You" (1985)

Soooo...summer reading.  You never know how much you are going to get read.  You never know the quality of what you will get read and you never know how it is going end… until Labor day.  So it was a pretty good summer. Sweetbitter, The Fixers, Nobody's Fool… all had their merits but I ended with Jay Mc Inerney’s “Bright Precious Days”.  

Mc Inerney is like an old annoying friend. ”Bright Lights Big City” and “Ransom” grabbed me 30 years ago and I was fascinated. Here was the new brilliance.  Along with Bret Easton Ellis here were the cool young talents that should carry my generation.  Our Faulkner, our Hemingway, our...disappointment.  Because that is what they kind of ended up as.  Easton Ellis burned out fabulously and literally “shot his wad” with “American Psycho” and Easton Ellis, like an unprofitable John Grisham, just kept writing the same book, with the same cadence and the same “look no hands” writing style.

Mc Inerney is a great writer but his “Bright Lights” tale has been done and following the career of an aging, editor, failed author, book/wine/food snob got really annoying with this book. Every character was deeply and uninterestingly flawed.  Each character was and is relentlessly unfaithful to their spouses, their partners and ultimately themselves and it is all justified because they were the movers and shakers brave enough to go to Manhattan and burn bright, and burn out.  But unfortunately in “Bright Precious Days” some of these people, most of them in fact have now lived to middle age. And that is too bad.

The book is set in a period prior to the “Great Recession” as we like to think of it, and culminates in the 2008 election of Barack Obama.  Russell and Corinne… bright, promising and full of energy and intelligence are exhausted, raising two privileged id sweet kids, whose actual mother is Corrine’s sister.  There are parties and fundraisers filled with drama and betrayal and always booze and sometimes drug.  There is a literary bad boy whose death is telegraphed so painfully that half way through I told my daughter, “there is something sad about seeing a character marked for death halfway into the book,  and then continuing to read about their exploits know it will end poorly for them.”

A strong message of the book...not everyone handles success and money well… and drugs are bad.  About marital infidelity… I would like to say the book is more nuanced but that is too kind to the book.  Cheating on your wife is just something which happens and it is ok and it is ok doing it many times, sometimes in long term relationships, sometimes one and done… but it seems to always be OK.  It seems off putting being at the same age as the characters in the book and taking this as the “lesson” of life.

The book was difficult to complete because none of the characters are likable.  You can root for no one.  They all live in gilded cages of their own making and Mc Inerney cannot resist hitting tonelessly, every trope of NYC literati/money/vacuous bullshit along the way.  I know he writes about wine (although I have not read his wine books) but I really don't need to be bopped on the nose with great labels that they are sucking down...I get it.  I was grateful that apparently no one had invented the Sous Vide method at that time or we would have seen Russell cooking something for a dinner party with it or preparing for one of their annual parties up at their rental in the Hamptons.  I mean, seriously… I love reading The New Yorker but you cannot necessarily write a book for the best seller lists based on living The New Yorker for 30 plus years.  But perhaps that is the point.  The book is written for those who have gone there and lived “the dream” and for those in flyover country who still dream of it.

Once again, we get it, Manhattan is awesome….

And hard…

And it tests you…

And sucks the life out of you….

And is too expensive to be survivable…

But there is no simply no other way a seriously creative person could live their life.  For God’s sake Russell and Corrine met at Brown.

Reading the book as these people stumble through their alternately brilliant and horrible lives the only thing i could think of is that they needed to get to church and reflect a little on their lives.  Even when they are doing good in their charities it tends to be to serve their egos or to fill the vast holes created in the tragedies of their lives.

In the end they pull up from everyone dying in the crash preceding the great recession, but not by much.  Dreams have been reigned in, relationships recalibrated and in the end the book ends up being about the resiliency of imperfect marriages and imperfect people.  I look forward to all of their retirements in south Florida in “The Bright Twilight of Their Days”.  I pray that he doesn't serve up these people living another 20 years.