SOURCE: "McInerney's Redemption," in Chicago Tribune Books, June 7, 1992, p. 3.

In the following review, Birkerts offers a favorable assessment of Brightness Falls.

"Whom the gods would destroy," Cyril Connolly once wrote, "they first call promising." Jay McInerney, the most visible of the much-maligned "brat-packers" of the 1980s, might have done well to have the words stenciled on the front of his favorite T-shirt, for in recent years the track of his astonishing ascendancy has been playing in slow-motion reverse.

Every book after McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, every late-night grimace snapped by the papparazzi of the fashion tabloids, seemed to further erode the magic. It was the writer become object lesson, the F. Scott Fitzgerald story minus only the literary contribution.

But like Rocky Balboa and Freddy Kruger, McInerney is back. And all of those who were licking their chops in expectation of further comeuppance will be disappointed. While...