When less is more

It’s 2008 in Manhattan, and there’s still a brief window for the Goldman bankers to swill their ’82 Petrus before the crash, for the masters of the universe and social X-rays first sighted in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities to launch another hostile takeover or push a lettuce leaf around a $25,000-a-table benefit dinner-plate. For Russell Calloway, encountered here for the third time, following previous outings in the novels Brightness Falls and The Good Life, such decadence is both revolting and alluring: as a struggling independent publisher, he is committed to the survival of bohemianism and the life of the mind; as a bon viveur, oenophile and gourmand, he’s made his peace with sniffing round the rich men’s tables. Not for nothing does he revel in obtaining a reservation at a new underground restaurant in which fish sperm and live prawns writhing under a coating of wasabi go under the name ‘transgressive fusion’.

Bright, Precious Days is also a work of fusion, although, with the best will in the world, it would be a stretch to describe it as transgressive. It is partly an account of mid-life crisis and partly a satirical social chronicle, but its double intention is its downfall: the melancholy sense of encroaching mortality and uncomfortable self-knowledge of the former makes the endless trend-spotting seem a little, well, callow.

Neither does the immense good fortune enjoyed by Russell and his wife, Corrine, make their travails seem terribly relatable, to use a word that Russell would almost certainly excise from any manuscript that crossed his desk. Sure, they’re a touch crammed into their TriBeCa loft; then again, they can always ship out to a townhouse in the newly emerging hotspot of SoHa (South Harlem); and yes, Corrine’s film adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter didn’t do very well, but luckily she has a new career distributing food to New York’s poor, which is so much more rewarding than her earlier life at Merrill Lynch.