McInerney has often been compared with F. Scott Fitzgerald, both for his unofficial title as chronicler of a highliving decade and for his personal good looks and lifestyle, and McInerney has sometimes encouraged that comparison, both through references to The Great Gatsby (1925) and through evocation of that novel's ending in this work. Other writers who have mined New York society for works of literary realism, including Edith Wharton, Thomas Wolfe, and John Cheever, might also be seen as literary forebears for McInerney, with Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), another novel about the disintegration of society in the 1980s, providing a significant point of comparison.

This novel may also be read as a roman a clef, a work of fiction which is based on actual people and events.

(Harold Propp, for example, is generally conceded to be based on real-life author Harold Brodkey.) As such, Brightness Falls...