BRIGHT, PRECIOUS DAYS

By Jay McInerney

Knopf, 397 pp., $27.95

‘Bright, Precious Days’’ brings back for the third time Russell and Corrine Calloway from author Jay McInerney’s novels “Brightness Falls’’ (1992) and “The Good Life’’ (2006), two rather unsuccessful books that sought to capture the inner life of Manhattan at particular moments of collapse in that city’s late history: the stock market crash of 1987 and the destruction of the twin towers in 2001. Likewise, “Bright, Precious Days’’ chronicles the two years leading up to the worldwide economic ruin of 2008.

Those earlier novels fell short because of McInerney’s inability to use the backdrops of those events in any way but to bludgeon us with the notion of each as a metaphor for greed and corruption, both of the heart and of the hedge fund, the catastrophes serving as mere set dressing for the self-involved myopia of yuppie characters with perfect New York lives, about which, finally, we don’t much care.

Such is also the fate of this next installment. As the book opens, the once-golden couple Russell and Corrine, now decidedly middle aged, are trying as best they can to make-do with their now malaiseful marriage by executing Big Moves, Russell in acquiring a major but dubious book for his struggling press, and Corrine heading back to the sack with her outrageously rich paramour, Luke, from “The Good Life.’’ “Oh, Russell, is this it?’’ Corrine erupts at their traditional Valentine’s Day dinner out, with Luke and how she recently bumped into him heavy on her mind. “Roses once a year and maybe . . . obligatory [sex]. We’re fifty years old. Where’s the romance? Whatever happened to the romance?’’ It’s a bland and predictable sentiment acted out in a hundred Lifetime channel movies, and dictates much of the pitch and timbre of the rest of the book.

Throughout this facile tale one can hear the plodding feet of the encroaching worldwide bust — a secondary character is a broker for (who else?) Lehman Brothers, the now defunct poster child for the Great Recession — while our heroes, such as they are, engineer tryst and deal and tryst and deal, heading to their own moral and financial bankruptcies.

It comes then as no surprise that when the economic crisis hits, a similar personal crisis befalls our characters. But before all that, we are force-fed episode after episode of life in the fairer reaches of the moneyed class: sexual interludes in the vineyards of South Africa, sexual escapades with a cell phone accidentally turned on during a charity ball, sexual discoveries in the brownstone brothels of Manhattan. None of which advance the story, all seeming instead just to entertain while we wait for the world’s financial wreck to occur. And as promised, with the collapse of the sub-prime world and all its attendant woes, so too the jig is up for Russell and Corinne, both left either to return to each other or go it alone.

If all this sounds like little more than a romance novel, that’s because, sadly, that’s what it feels like.

It’s hard at this point to avoid recalling the promise and influence of McInerney’s first novel, “Bright Lights, Big City,’’ published three decades ago, and of course there’s no news in reporting he’s not the brazen bad boy his first book seemed to suggest he’d become and that his books since haven’t delivered.

It almost feels at times that McInerney has a similar sense of nostalgia.

Present are lengthy flashbacks to the cocaine-addled days of ’80s Manhattan, passages that could have been outtakes from “Bright Lights.’’ Take this description of Corrine’s first experience with cocaine: “After several tries, she consumes two of the lines and feels very pleased with herself . . . Nothing scary here. She feels almost normal, except better than normal.’’ There’s even a strange cameo appearance by Allison Poole, the drugged-up protagonist of McInerney’s third novel, “Story of My Life,’’ who chases Russell through the dark night of his soul, a kind of harridan meant to remind him of his lifelong narcissism.

But nostalgia isn’t much of a driving force for the making of a good book, and that McInerney has come to write as ill-focused, distended and, finally, as needless a book as this is disappointing. The good news? Perhaps now he might be done with the Calloways and can turn his considerable storytelling talent to some more fruitful tale, inhabited by characters that matter.

BRIGHT, PRECIOUS DAYS

By Jay McInerney

Knopf, 397 pp., $27.95

Bret Lott, former editor of the Southern Review, teaches at the College of Charleston. His most recent books are “Letters and Life: On Being a Writer, On Being a Christian’’ and the novel “Dead Low Tide.’’