SOURCE: "Campfire of the Vanities," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 7, 1992, p. 3.

Below, Eder offers a negative review of Brightness Falls.

Thomas Nashe's "A Litany in Time of Plague" is one of the most celebrated and haunting of Elizabethan poems, with its bony caution to mortality:

      Beauty is but a flower
      Which wrinkles will devour;
      Brightness falls from the air,
      Queens have died young and fair,
      Dust hath closed Helen's eye.
      I am sick, I must die….

Using it for his title, then for a reference, and finally quoting two stanzas at the climactic funeral in his novel about the flourish and decline of glittery New York lives, Jay McInerney manages to turn it into kitsch.

In Bright Lights, Big City, published a decade ago, McInerney wrote of privileged post-college kids drifting aimlessly through sex and drugs. It was brittle, hip and sometimes witty; the qualities were...