Bright, Precious Days: A novel

by Jay McInerney Narrated by Edoardo Ballerini

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

AUGUST 2016 - AudioFile

The author of the bestselling BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY (1984) looks at the elites who move through the art galleries and book parties of New York City. Narrator Edoardo Ballerini knowingly affects the accents and vocal rhythms of Corrine and Russell Calloway as they deal with the pressures of trying to maintain their lives as prices climb. Ballerini shines as he portrays Jack, a novelist with a distinct point of view who is discovered by Russell, an independent publisher. Jack is either the best thing that could have happened or a great risk. It’s 2008, and listeners—but not the Calloways—know what’s coming. McInerney is best at reflecting the lives of the beautiful people of Manhattan. Ballerini matches the tone of these sketches with a sharply honed delivery. R.O. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

06/20/2016
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.)

From the Publisher

Our modern-day Fitzgerald.” —Anderson Tepper, Vanity Fair

“Without any judgement but with the understanding and empathy of a brightly illuminating cultural inspector, Jay McInerney delivers encounters and relationships, at times hilarious and exhilarating or excruciating between and among those individuals who are compelled to live nowhere else but on that tiny sliver of granite—Manhattan. Non-residents worldwide will enjoy the fates of these metropolitan dancers who wriggle, pop, squirm and sizzle under the searing red ray of McInerney's magnifying glass.” —Dan Aykroyd

“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.” —Keir Graff, Booklist

From the Hardcover edition.

Library Journal

★ 07/01/2016
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

AUGUST 2016 - AudioFile

The author of the bestselling BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY (1984) looks at the elites who move through the art galleries and book parties of New York City. Narrator Edoardo Ballerini knowingly affects the accents and vocal rhythms of Corrine and Russell Calloway as they deal with the pressures of trying to maintain their lives as prices climb. Ballerini shines as he portrays Jack, a novelist with a distinct point of view who is discovered by Russell, an independent publisher. Jack is either the best thing that could have happened or a great risk. It’s 2008, and listeners—but not the Calloways—know what’s coming. McInerney is best at reflecting the lives of the beautiful people of Manhattan. Ballerini matches the tone of these sketches with a sharply honed delivery. R.O. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2016-05-04
McInerney returns to Russell and Corrine Calloway, the protagonists of his last two novels—call it The Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Fancy Pants, Volume III: The Cialis Years." 'This is lily paste dumpling wrap around foie gras. And this is twenty-four-karat gold leaf,' the waiter [said], dusting each of the dumplings as Russell watched his wife's expression grow incredulous. 'And this,' he said, sprinkling what looked like bacon bits over Corrine's plate, 'crushed quail skull.' " It really doesn't make much difference what it is — the women in this book eat almost nothing. Except for Corrine's daughter, the precocious Storey Calloway, twin of Jeremy. One of the many things to dislike about Corrine in this, her third incarnation, is that she's so concerned by her 11-year-old daughter's interest in food. "At breakfast she wants to know what's for lunch, and at lunch she asks about dinner. And she's started to watch that damn Food Network." Finally, thank God, she starts to starve herself like everyone else. Corrine was the moral compass of her set in Brightness Falls (1992). In The Good Life (2006), she found love at a soup kitchen in the ruins of the World Trade Center. Now that love interest is back on the scene, and she resumes her adulterous affair with surprising ease, partly influenced by her truly appalling best friend, Casey. Russell's career in publishing is a mess, cocaine is back—"it's not like [it] ever went away," one character explains—and the "jitney" to the Hamptons is really just a bus with a fancy name. After a long, draggy midsection, the end of this novel kicks into high gear, with a torrent of personal crises, the financial crash, and the Obama election, though a gun pulled out in an early act never goes off. Isn't that against the rules? So is this dialogue, or at least it should be: "Oh, Russell, is this it? Roses once a year and maybe an obligatory drunken fuck? We're fifty years old. Where's the romance?"Whether you love him or hate him, this novel is just what you're expecting from McInerney. So he must be doing it on purpose.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171908089
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	08/02/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

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.

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