SOURCE: A review of Brightness Falls, in The New York Times Book Review, May 31, 1992, p. 7.

In the following review, Schine offers qualified praise for Brightness Falls.

A trash novel tells you everything you already know about a way of life you will, in fact, never know. A serious novel tells you, in one way or another, what you don't know about the familiar, the personal, the dailiness of life—and so about life itself. Brightness Falls, Jay McInerney's fourth novel, is an easy, entertaining trash novel with welcome glimpses of authentic writing—moments of honest pleasure stashed here and there, unobtrusively, almost apologetically.

With the publication of his celebrated first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, in 1984, Mr. McInerney became the first, and certainly the best, of the fashionably fallen literary young men of the 1980's. Now he has written a novel about the fall of such fashionable young...