With Brightness Falls, Mclnerney brings full circle the frenetic story of the 1980s he began in Bright Lights, Big City. The unbridled drug use, sexuality, greed, and evasion of personal responsibility depicted in his other books receive their logical rewards in this novel, which shows the disillusion with which many in the 1990s now regard the 1980s, a decade founded on illusory good times and high living.

Personal vices pervade the novel. Jeff Pierce, a young writer who (like Mclnerney) achieves early success, escapes the responsibility of further literary genius by losing himself in heroin use and sex, and he is far from the only character indulging in escape through those or similar means. But as always in Mclnerney's work, actions have consequences, and this is particularly true in the closing days of the 1980s, when the novel is set. The novel opens, in fact, with...