Brightness falls Book

Have you ever attended a long cocktail party at an elegant hotel with crowds of well dressed people chattering while a piano player provides background music and after the ball is over find yourself at home with the vague impression that you have not actually been anywhere? If so, you have a good idea of what this book is about.

Jay McInerney enjoyed some acclaim for "Bright Lights, Big City," but this effort is eminently forgettable. It is well written, mildly humorous at times but ultimately inconclusive and totally inconsequential. I found the characters as polite and as interesting as talking to a courteous necktie salesman, a bathroom attendant or a high rise building doorman. To put it another way, you could have watched two reruns of "Mad About You" and gotten the same result.