Brightness Falls by Jay McInerney
★★★★★ | Literary Fiction | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I didn’t like this book at first. I felt claustrophobic, there in the first chapter, squeezed in at the kids’ table surrounded by a large group of strangers at a Manhattan apartment dinner party. These guests were too witty, overly confident, and entirely full of themselves. Who talks like this? And more pressing, who would want to read an entire novel with these assholes?
But I persevered. In fact, it was the Manhattan setting of this book that initially drew me. I lived in New York in the mid-1990s and recently returned to an apartment on the Upper East Side, where much of the story takes place. McInerney’s first book, Bright Lights, Big City, helped to convince me to move to New York when I read it in college. The descriptions of the city, its magic, and absurdity were spellbinding. The city itself becomes a character in the story, which we follow over a year, from the bitter cold of winter through the languor of summer to the bracing beauty of fall.
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