Bright Lights Tonight

Unstoppable McInerney

Working on sequel to “Brightness Falls” and “The Good Life.”

Thirty years after writing Bright Lights, Big City, which rocketed him to literary fame, Jay McInerney is at work on another novel that will once again feature Russell and Corrine Calloway, a publishing couple whose marriage McInerney has chronicled since setting their story in the New York of 1987 in Brightness Falls and then The Good Life. The latest book begins on election night of 2004 and ends on the same day in 2008. McInerney, who’s in his fourth marriage, says he’s able to see what it’s like to stay married to your high school sweetheart through Russell Calloway. “It’s a kind of way of exploring the ‘counterlife,’ to borrow Philip Roth’s great phrase,” McInerney says.