As a paradigmatic city of our entire civilization, with its contrasts and stridency, New York also frequently reaches cinema and literature through movies. Woody Allen, the books of Paul auster or from Carcaterra. As well as through a gazillion other examples that would uselessly fill this entry.
The thing is Jay McInerney also decided that the city of cities was to become the epicenter of its plots until it reached the status of protagonist together with its inhabitants selected for the occasion. His work of fiction, not very extensive, has the goodness of aging well, of presenting dilemmas that are always valid. That is why his Calloway Trilogy is a sure value for reissues.
In the slow construction of this series there are touches of melancholy for bygone eras and longings overwhelmed by the frenzy of an unbridled city, with its racing heart of Manhattan. As the years go by in the lives of the Calloways, we discover human essences covered in frustrations, fleeting successes, love, and circumstances. Contrasts between the strength of youth and the stillness of old age in a place, yes, that is not for old people.
In the end, NY devours its creatures once again. The city rescues new lives from pretentious ideas and puts aside old glories. NY as a kind of Olympus, a concrete God who marks destinies and who forgets, in the heat of a life that in its inert condition cannot be enjoyed, that transience is everything for its bewildered inhabitants.
Jay McInerney's Top 3 Recommended Novels
When the light falls
The takeoff of a series in a time of the most emblematic of the city of New York, there when his legend spread throughout the world like that of the cosmopolis where anything could happen. A city on the brink of social cataclysm in some neighborhoods and capable of the most obscene waste in its most privileged areas, where the Calloways would like to live forever.
Corrine is a young Stockbroker on Wall Street; Russell, her husband, is an ambitious editor who considers himself underpaid. They are happily married and live in the exciting New York of the mid-eighties, where opportunities are not lacking for those who have the wisdom and the ambition to take advantage of them.
Yet that's just another mirage of an era drawing to a close: the Calloways will soon realize that everything that goes up ends up going down, both in the stock market and in life. McInerney writes an elegy on the New York of literary chimeras and company mergers. For those who did not live it, When the light falls captures the rapture of an era and fills with truth a few years that would otherwise seem unreal to us. A novel about a marriage that begins to leave its golden youth behind and that realizes that life, perhaps, prefers them to be responsible and mature.
The good life
Writing about New York with the vocation of giving prominence to the city between the end of the 11th century and the beginning of the XNUMXst, also has to go through XNUMX/XNUMX and seek the particular focus between the life of the Calloways with the transcendence of the atrocious historical moment.
After overcoming many difficulties, the Calloway couple is still together. Russell continues to work as an editor, albeit in a less important position, and Corrine has left her job on the stock market to dedicate herself to her two young children and writing a screenplay.
On the Upper East Side, Luke McGavock, a billionaire investment manager, has decided to take a year off so he can spend more time with his wife and teenage daughter. However, one morning in September 2001 the sky over New York darkens, and in the days that follow, people who were not meant to meet end up working hand in hand on rebuilding the city.
En The good life, Jay McInerney takes up his two most charismatic characters and uses what he does best: introduce us to the social and moral complexity of New York City and some characters in whom we will find echoes of our own lives.
Days of light and splendor
Perhaps in the end it is best to flee New York, to assume that the city has already defeated you or that it simply has nothing to give you. In that dislocation, which nevertheless passes everywhere at an age, we discover the best glimpses of humanity of an unforgettable couple.
After decades together, Russell and Corrine Calloway would like to have a calm and stable family life, something that seems impossible to achieve in New York after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. They dream of being able to raise their children closer to the field, but their financial situation does not allow it. In a risky attempt to refloat his publishing house, Russell will hire a book that will be his salvation or his undoing, while the reappearance of a friend of Corrine's will question the solidity of their relationship.
Days of light and splendor is an addictive novel that immerses us fully in the Manhattan of the early twenty-first, with the election of Obama and the global economic collapse as a backdrop. In it McInerney again follows in the footsteps of Russell and Corrine to delve into the challenges of love and marriage and, like a Fitzgerald of our time, draw a superb portrait of the lights and shadows of the American dream. A brilliant conclusion to his trilogy of novels dedicated to the Calloways.
