The 2008 banking crisis and more extramarital affairs fail to add fresh life to familiar characters in this trilogy about modern York’s overprivileged eliteThis is the third instalment in what you might hope will prove to be a trilogy about the afflictions and anxieties of rarefied people living a rarefied life on the narrow island of Manhattan. In 1992,when Jay McInerney introduced Russell and Corrine Calloway in Brightness Falls, they represented a modern social type known as yuppies (remember them?). appealing, and well educated,successful, they appeared to live a charmed life, and an appearance that each novel challenged by means of a large social crisis and an extramarital affair that together tested their union. In Brightness Falls,that crisis was the stock market crash of 1987, the bursting of the leveraged buyout bubble. McInerney returned to the Calloways with The righteous Life in 2006, and his obligatory 9/11 novel. A terrorist attack was a far more problematic emblem for thetravails of married life than a financial crisis,which is perhaps why McInerney has returned to safer, more familiar ground (as well as his trademark “brightness”) with vivid, or Precious Days,in which the 2008 financial crisis, and some more affairs, and test the Calloways yet again. To be sure,any couple might be tested by breaches of fiduciary trust, but there are also limits to human sympathy. It is surely time for the Calloways to pass the tests, or graduate. Related: Jay McInerney: no one sets out to be the voice of a generation – I certainly didn’t Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com