Bright New York

Bright, Precious Days
by Jay McInerney
Bloomsbury, 2016, 416 pages, $29.99
__________________________

Filed in my sock drawer was a list of things that I liked to do in New York. If I happened to be in Manhattan on a Friday, around five o’clock, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was the place to be. A quartet played in the balcony overlooking the floral arrangements landscaping the foyer. Lingering with a glass of something until eight o’clock was very special. Walking up the main staircase, one could glimpse the Tiepolos, take a left past the Chinese ceramics and grab a table. Oh goodness me, very Upper East Side.

The other wonderful experience was to eat a sampler plate at the New York Oyster Bar in Grand Central . The trick was to find it. Entering the main concourse with its zodiac starry sky above, meandering to the right as if to a train platform … There it was—a buffet with chrome stools, straight out of an Edward Hopper painting. The night train to Tallahassee might pull in shortly.

And now? Maybe one should avoid repeating loved events. On a recent visit, the quartet had gone, replaced by a flautist and a grand piano—and the tables had multiplied. And Emily Blunt as Rachel in the film The Girl on the Train was siphoning mid-morning martinis at the Oyster Bar. It looked too bright, too cosy, and she ate the olive. I am reminded of Jay McInerney’s opening pages of Bright Lights, Big City, his 1985 debut novel: “You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head … The bald girl is saying this used to be a good place to come before the assholes discovered it.”

Want to be current in New York? Then walk the High Line to the new Whitney Museum of American Art in the Meatpacking District. The High Line is a landscaped stretch of a former elevated rail track. Along 20th Street or so, slip past the hipster restaurant Cookshop, where all the food is sourced from personally known suppliers who have their own boutique farms. Climb the nearby industrial stair to this urban public garden. The sight lines are spectacular: straight up 10th Avenue to Hell’s Kitchen and beyond. The planting evokes a natural landscape—trees and grasses—with sculpture and seats for lounging. At the end of the Line, the Whitney is showing a retrospective of the 101-year-old Cuban-American artist Carmen Herrera. On the floors below is Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney Collection. It is pleasant to view the faces of America—from the early collections of Mrs Vanderbilt Whitney’s, past the sureness of the 1970s, to an uneasy gaze of the 2000s.

When you tire of being a hipster, keep walking to One Wall Street, the Oculus, a new mall and train station opened recently, fifteen years after the September 11 terrorist attack. It is a winged beauty, a very expensive Nike. The architect has referred to imagery of a child holding a dove and it is an apt response—the building touches gently between Wall Street buildings and abuts the two water pits of the memorial to those who died in the attack. There couldn’t be a greater contrast. The water pits are continually weeping into the ground as if to douse the flames of the buildings. The Oculus, on the other hand, has opened the underworld to reflected light. People are going about their business of catching trains, eating sandwiches and taking selfies in soft bright light.

Decades ago, Jay McInerney began his richly American trilogy of Corrine and Russell Calloway’s life in Manhattan. Brightness Falls (1992) was followed by The Good Life (2006) and completed by Bright, Precious Days in 2016. McInerney is a writer of his age. I purchased his first novel in a Bloomsbury Classics small-format hardback edition that fitted nicely into my hand. It was very “Bright” and right; a Kerouac in the city before someone told him life can’t go on in this way.

Three novels sited in New York are lodestars for writers: Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Published in 2011, Amor Towles’s novel Rules of Civility is set in the 1930s when the 21 Club opened as a speakeasy, one decade after Fitzgerald’s novel. On the face of it, the publishers wanted to stress this link by using the same Condé Nast cover photograph as had been on a paperback version of Gatsby. The text is aesthetically pleasing, as civility and money always are. But unlike Fitzgerald’s it is a historical novel. Towles has given us reshaped characters, ten years after Gatsby was shot in his swimming pool. His Daisy is a sassy girl who reads and marries old money. His Jay rises and falls happily into obscurity. And yes, there is a whiff of contemporary temperament in his characters. McInerney, on the other hand, maintains his urbanity, with “Russell Calloway” echoing Fitzgerald’s “Nick Carraway”, the narrator of Gatsby. And John McInerney has stepped into Jay.

Fans of literary allusions have a lot to discover in the trilogy. The clearest is his badging of “Bright” referencing William Blake’s “The Tyger” in Songs of Experience. There is a clue: Russell Calloway spent a postgraduate year in Oxford reading Blake. More distant is the theme of loss of innocence in “The Tyger”, “When the stars threw down their spears / And water’d heaven with their tears”, and the unknown narrator in Brightness Falls: “a girl in my [psychiatric] unit … declared that she could see paper airplanes crashing to the pavement of Manhattan”.

If allusion-searching is too affected, the first lines of Bright, Precious Days ought to endear any writer to McInerney’s story:

Once, not so 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 …

Russell and Corrine are English Lit graduates from Brown University, Rhode Island. They move to New York to do exactly as the opening lines suggest. But the Calloways live through torrid times. Russell works for a publisher and goes to launching parties of other people’s books. Corrine writes a script, an adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel The Heart of the Matter, to modest praise. The second book deals with the drama of September 11—a defining political moment for the twenty-first century.

The third volume takes the reader to the global financial crisis of 2008. Russell is running a small literary publication company and makes an over-generous rights offer. At stake are private school fees, the TriBeCa loft and summer in the Hamptons. Corrine and Russell are in their fifties and the future begins to look forbidding. But it has always been precarious. Their parties have had the frantic edge of the financially insecure. The couple take on a veneer of Scott and Zelda dropped into the plot of Tender is the Night. She is from “old money” that accompanies thinness and blondness. The money has long gone, with only memories of the shabby summerhouse in Nantucket and the manners to go with it. His family is from Cork County, Boston and Detroit. Also thin and given to wearing navy blue jackets in his thirties, he is keen to party with social New Yorkers from a certain stratum. Everyone they know is a Democrat. The token conservative is Corrine’s sister Hilary, and she has clearly stepped out with the wrong crowd. Corrine has a lover who appears in the second novel and resurfaces in the third. Voting intentions are vetted in a pre-coital banter:

“Actually, I’ve gotten pretty involved in the Obama campaign. I was suddenly worried you might be a Hillary person.”

“Why, because I’m a woman?”

“No, just because I’ve always imagined that we have similar views and tastes. I would have been slightly disappointed if we hadn’t picked the same candidate.”

“… And yes, I’m actually an Obama person.”

And off came the blue dress.

McInerney is a chronicler of a city that is forever reinventing itself, but perversely these volumes have a whiff of being past their sell-by date. Can we recall the intensity of Obama versus Hillary? Dimly. It is as if these characters are talking to the select few inside a blue-lined zeppelin tethered to the Empire State Building. McInerney allows them to descend into downtown Manhattan for hilarious adventures at restaurants with unknown addresses and unlisted phone numbers.

“What kind of food do they serve?”

“I think it’s kind of Japanese avant-garde.”

“How can food be avant-garde?” …

“The chef would like you to begin with live dancing shrimp.”

My sock drawer is more than a filing cabinet of old memories. I have at least two pairs remaining —a Japanese variety that separates the toes and a burnt-orange over-the-knee type from Portugal. Both are very hard to put on in a hurry. So I don’t bother and instead read the dog-eared receipt from the Blue Hill restaurant in Greenwich Village. Did I really eat that fantasy of farm-to-table food? The same place as Barack Obama took Michelle in his first term. And in a corner is a box of matches from “21”. I sat at the banquette table favoured by Helen Gurley Brown opposite the one preferred by Donald Trump—although it is likely that President-Elect Trump booked the whole place on November 8.

Russell and Corrine would have reluctantly come down from their Italianate brownstone in Harlem, drawn to the new people in charge. Over the decades the Calloways have rewritten the same affectations as Gatsby’s “old sport” banter. But there are new rules in place. Will Corrine find a job paying more than her food-distributing NGO? Can Russell settle his outrageous wine bill? McInerney could put his characters in the chiller; less earnestness, a lot less civility and much, much less sex between fifty-year-olds. Although I liked the blue halter-necked dress.