Brightness Falls is McInerney's most strongly developed response to the culture he has depicted throughout his body of work. While he has often written about characters searching for meaning in a fast-paced world, most successfully in Bright Lights, Big City and Story of My Life, this novel, because of its multitude of point-of-view characters and the variety of plots and subplots, most strongly draws the conclusions that getting caught in the surging current of everyday life can pull one to disaster and that it is important to have something — or someone — to cling to.