SOURCE: "A Golden Couple of the Age of Accretion," in The Wall Street Journal, June 12, 1992, p. A12.

In the following review, Olshan offers tempered praise for Brightness Falls.

Nearly everyone and everything in Jay McInerney's ambitious fourth novel, Brightness Falls, is leveraged. Companies falsify their assets with elaborate facades; authors who are paid egregious advances cannot honor their commitments; undesirable body parts are pumped with silicone that might explode should the unlucky patron ride the Concorde.

In his novels and stories of the 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald also explored an era's unmet desires and inflated expectations, but with a nostalgia that Mr. McInerney wisely avoids when he writes about the '80s. Brightness Falls adopts a Fitzgeraldian tone in the names of its main characters, Russell and Corinne Calloway, a glamorous couple who recall Dick and Nicole Diver in "Tender Is the Night" (Mr. McInerney's penultimate title for...