Marriage and fidelity in the big city
Jay McInerney, one of Gen X’s most famous voices, delves deeper into New York City
In a recent Paris Review interview, Jay McInerney said of the Calloways, the golden couple at the centre of the trilogy of novels that includes 1992’s “Brightness Falls” and 2006’s “The Good Life,” and concludes here with “Bright, Precious Days:” “They’ve become the instruments through which I register the history of New York in my time.”
They are also, he admitted in the same interview, a way of exploring notions of marriage and fidelity. “It seems to me,” said the four-times-married McInerney, “that the odds are against any marriage surviving Manhattan for twenty-five or thirty years. Manhattan is not, in my view, conducive to monogamy.”
An understandable position when one considers McInerney’s Manhattan: the coked-up, oversexed, overprivileged, boozy glitter-dome he revealed in his magnificent and much lauded 1984 debut, “Bright Lights, Big City,” and revisited in the raucous follow-ups, “Story of My Life” and “The Last of the Savages.”
Both Corrine and Russell Calloway understand, however, that the “best marriages, like the best boats, are the ones that ride out the storms. They take on water; they shudder and list, very nearly capsize, then right themselves and sail onward toward the horizon.”
College sweethearts, married in their mid-twenties, the Calloways have weathered many a tempest: adultery, near financial ruin, and a devastating miscarriage in “Brightness Falls;” parenthood, more adultery, as well as overwhelming personal loss in the wake of 9/11 in “The Good Life.”
“Bright, Precious Days” finds the Calloways in 2008, still together and afloat on seemingly calm waters. Russell, a long suffering book editor, now helms his own publishing house and has built a reputation as a major literary player. Corrine, a former stockbroker, heads up a charity, Nourish New York, which provides fresh fruit and vegetables to the underprivileged.
That’s not to say there aren’t dark clouds in the distance. For Russell, they come in the form of two authors. One, Jack Carson, a literary enfant terrible reminiscent of Russell’s late friend, the writer Jeff Pierce, a central doomed figure in “Brightness Falls;” the other, Phillip Kohout, a louche scribbler who has a chequered past with Russell.
The main storm cloud on Corrine’s horizon is Luke McGavock, a retired investment banker with whom she had a passionate affair in the days and months following the attack on the World Trade Center. Their relationship, the heart of the matter of “The Good Life,” very nearly ended her marriage. Rekindled six years on, it threatens to do so again.
While this romance was the strong suit of its predecessor — full of desperate intensity borne of tragic circumstance — it proves the glaring weakness of “Bright, Precious Days.”
Successfully played against type in the previous book — a money man who abandons it all, to embrace instead the high ideals of honour and sacrifice — the character of McGavock here is little more than a wealthy dilettante. Ready to turn his back on a devoted second wife and nascent charitable foundation for the chance at reviving the affair.
For her part, Corrine seems driven by memories of great sex. “Goddamn it!” she says at one point. “I was hoping it wouldn’t be as good as I remembered.”
Much of the romantic dialogue between the two has descended to this sort of clichéd woodenness, which only serves to highlight the superficiality of their personalities. Then again, McInerney has never been accused of writing characters of great depth.
This is not a charge that goes unacknowledged by the author. During one of the many dinner parties — the trilogy is rife with gourmandize — one character opines, during a discussion of 9/11: “It’s like it never happened. We were all going to change our lives, and in the end we’re the same shallow, grasping hedonists we used to be.”
In the past, McInerney has been compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Lofty claims, to be sure, but there is a certain affinity. Not in the quality of prose — McInerney lacks the lyrical sophistication, the gemlike glitter — but certainly in the veneration of wealth, status and personal gratification.
Neither is there much that is redeeming about either author’s characters. Gatsby is littered with horrible people.
But this is the very thing that makes it so compelling: there is something so very real about the dreadfulness of Nick and Daisy and Jordan, et al.
The same can be said of Russell and Corrine and their crew. They really are quite awful: selfish, shallow, disloyal and, like Fitzgerald’s bunch, remarkably careless.
But the fact is, they are all the more fascinating for it.