Onward And Yupward

By John Skow

TITLE: BRIGHTNESS FALLS

AUTHOR: JAY McINERNEY

PUBLISHER: KNOPF; 416 PAGES; $23

THE BOTTOM LINE: McInerney fulfills his early promise with a funny, grownup portrait of a Lost Generation of the '80s.

THE VERY YOUNG GIVE OFFENSE BY displaying frontal lobes as unwrinkled as their rosy cheeks; and in his first novels, Jay McInerney, the very young author, wrote chapters that seemed a little too cute and a little too easy. Bright Lights, Big City tried hard for the "God, how that boy can write" award once owned by Scott Fitzgerald, but McInerney's next two books, Ransom and Story of My Life, had little to offer except boyishness and a good ear for dialogue. A few scenes of cocaine snorting, the names of a couple of trendy clubs, a little easy listening -- that's all it took.

Now, perhaps just in time to join the adults before the big door clicks shut in his face, McInerney, 37, appears with an entirely grownup novel about the end of the '80s. It's a funny, self-mocking, sometimes brilliant portrait of Manhattan's young literary and Wall Street crowd, our latest Lost Generation. If it's not quite Tender Is the Night, neither, cold-eyed readers will recall, was Tender Is the Night.

Russell and Corrine Calloway are young, bright and, like everyone they know, on the way up. He's a successful editor for a good publishing house, and she, somewhat less enthusiastically, is a stockbroker. As the first married of their pack of friends, the Calloways are frequent hosts to a semipermanent, citywide party. Guests are still young enough to remember when going to work with a hangover was fun, and most of them are old enough to have outgrown cocaine, or at least to have resolved to limit serious drugs to weekends and saint's days. But when Jeff, Russell's star first novelist, arrives at a bash with a 19-year-old model and a heroin habit, eyebrows are raised. Middle age is still a laughable rumor, but in a distant and abstract way, doom is understood to exist.

Part of the novel's fun is the flip, slightly unreal dialogue the characters toss back and forth. Corrine, who has a crush on Jeff, asks why he won't talk seriously about his feelings. He answers, "Basically, I think men talk to women so they can sleep with them, and women sleep with men so they can talk with them." A nonwriting author of great reputation is described as "Henry James with bowel movements." Social gradations are precisely noted, and the , level of smart-alecky prose is satisfactorily high, although there are lapses. McInerney uses amuletic and quotidian in the same herniated sentence, and calls three different women "raccoon-eyed," which sounds like something Philip Marlowe said while ducking bullets.

McInerney's version of Vanity Fair brings to mind The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), Tom Wolfe's memorably caustic social novel of Manhattan's decay. The two books, however, don't really resemble each other beyond their shared setting. Wolfe despises his characters and creates them in order to hold them up to ridicule, wriggling and in pain. McInerney cares deeply about the silly, grasping, ego-swollen pipsqueaks -- fairly decent, fairly normal people -- he invents. Wolfe's cold contempt gives the reader distance, a panoramic view of an ant colony. McInerney shows us human beings who feel wretched as they behave badly.

And McInerney writes one of the most touching scenes in recent fiction, far beyond bug-on-a-pin satire, when Jeff is hospitalized in a sanatorium. After months of furious denial, he befriends a broken young woman. She has hidden a shard of glass, presumably to commit suicide. He finds it and, not far from self-destruction himself, slices one of his fingers. He sobs, not from hurt but from sudden comprehension of finality. Unable to do more, she takes his finger and licks away the blood. Brightness Falls, from an impressive height.