SOURCE: "High Life," in Commentary, Vol. 94, No. 3, September, 1992, pp. 56-7.

In the following review, Toynton gives a negative evaluation of Brightness Falls.

"You will have to learn everything all over again." So goes the last line of Jay McInerney's first, most entertaining novel, Bright Lights, Big City (1984). The sentence could almost be taken as McInerney's own authorial program, since both he and his characters seem, in book after book, to be learning not exactly everything but the same thing all over again. And what do they learn? That the glittering allure of hip parties, fashionable clubs, naughty drugs—and, in Brightness Falls, his latest offering, big money—is really only superficial. That happiness is to be found in the simpler, human things of life—in love, kindness, honest work, fresh bread.

One might find McInerney's seeming amnesia baffling—why is he unable to recall, from one book to...