If this buttoned-up vision of the good life isn’t entirely convincing, neither is the answer McInerney offers—that the narrator is reeling from a family tragedy he hasn’t properly dealt with. The oversimplicity of this diagnosis wasn’t lost on McInerney, who has spent most of his career returning to the same questions, growing increasingly sophisticated in his attempts to understand the allure of self-destruction and the compromises required to support a sustainable degree of happiness for ambitious, intelligent (and relatively affluent) people.

In the seven novels and forty-odd stories he has published since “Bright Lights,” McInerney has experimented widely and with varying levels of success, veering from comedy to self-conscious seriousness, from the small and local to the decade-spanning. He has tried writing from the perspective of women (in the charming “Story of My Life,” from 1988) and sexually confused men (in “The Last of the Savages,” from 1996). But his interest in psychology has remained in place. It found its most thoughtful expression in “Brightness Falls,” which is broader in scope than “Bright Lights” and its closest rival, among McInerney’s novels, in the virtuosity and near-perfection of its execution.

The book seems at first very different from its predecessor, almost self-consciously so. “Brightness Falls,” like a nineteenth-century novel, is told from the perspective of an omniscient narrator; its humor is understated, derived from dry observation and clever dialogue. When Russell’s assistant—the office’s “token punk,” who wears an “Eat the Rich” button pinned to her shirt—tells him she is going to lunch, Russell replies, “I’ll warn Donald Trump.” McInerney’s focus has largely shifted from the question of sobriety (or the lack of it) to matters of status (or the lack of it). Of a writer friend of the Calloways, whose first book was an unexpected success, he writes, “Everyone listened to him just a little more intently these days, as he listened less attentively to everyone else.” But, unlike a social satirist such as Tom Wolfe, McInerney is equally deft at capturing personality traits. Russell’s charismatic friend Washington, for example, has “the ability to convince, if only to the point that you felt it would be very stuffy to believe completely in your own position, or for that matter in anything. It would be so uncool.”

Thematically, however, “Brightness Falls” and “Bright Lights” overlap substantially, as their titles suggest. Russell can be viewed as a cleaned-up version of the earlier book’s feckless narrator. He and Corrine live the kind of life that the hero of “Bright Lights” yearned for, complete with those de-rigueur Sunday-afternoon trips to museums. But they still aren’t all that happy. In their early thirties, they want to want what they have—each other, a committed relationship—but they are no more able to will away their nagging discontents than the narrator of “Bright Lights” was to refrain from snorting that final, inadvisable line.

Corrine feels neglected and unappreciated. She resents Russell’s insatiable need to socialize, his desire to be among fashionable people, not just because it keeps him from home but because his concern with status strikes her as a little ridiculous: “Proximity to the glamorous,” she thinks, “confirmed in Russell some sense of his own entitlement.” Russell, for his part, feels hemmed in by a wife whose judgment he both respects and resents, and annoyed by her need for continual reassurance. In the course of the novel, he becomes increasingly vulnerable to temptation. One evening, he finds himself more attracted to Corrine than he’s been in ages, but his passion is stoked more by egoism than eros. A sexy French heiress has hit on him, and the “narrowness of his escape” is exciting: the “vision of himself as an upright husband had increased his appreciation of the wife for whom he performed this heroic feat of abnegation.”

If the novel falters slightly, it is in the improbability of its central conceit—Russell’s outlandish attempt to buy his company. It feels forced, a means of linking Russell and Corrine’s personal problems to the headlines of the era. McInerney’s evocation of New York was so powerful in “Bright Lights” because it emerged naturally from the story he had to tell. By the time he wrote “Brightness Falls,” McInerney had been labelled a New York novelist, and, as if on cue, he delivers long, cinematic set pieces depicting everything from parties of the Upper East Side’s rich and shallow to police raids on homeless encampments in the East Village. They are well done, but feel performative, not quite organic.

The danger, of course, of double- (or triple-) dipping, as McInerney has done in reviving the cast of “Brightness Falls,” is that the later books invite comparison to the first. And “Bright, Precious Days,” like “The Good Life” before it, lacks the original’s texture and piquancy, its panoramic vibrancy. McInerney does a lot of plain telling, informing us with voice-over directness that the Calloways, “Ivy League sweethearts,” had “followed their best instincts and based their lives on the premise that money couldn’t buy happiness, learning only gradually the many varieties of unhappiness it might have staved off.” The sharpness of McInerney’s portrayals of side characters made for a big part of the pleasure of “Brightness Falls”; in the later books, he seems to rest on those characterizations, without adding to his earlier insights, like a man who built his home when he was richer and now can’t quite afford the upkeep. They’ve grown dusty, a little stale.

Although he has continued the tradition of draping the novels around pivotal events in New York’s recent history, McInerney’s evocation of the aughts feels halfhearted compared with the scene setting of his eighties novels. He leans heavily on proper nouns and topical references, something he did sparingly in both “Bright Lights” and “Brightness Falls.” When he did use one—when he name-dropped Donald Trump in “Brightness Falls,” for example—it served a dramatic purpose. In “Bright, Precious Days,” on the other hand, McInerney seems to be merely telegraphing the moment and milieu, as when he tells us that Corrine took her preteen daughter shopping at AllSaints, or that the girl and a friend went to see “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” or that Russell tried making “Mark Bittman’s improbable, and not entirely successful, forty-five-minute turkey.”

But if “Bright, Precious Days” doesn’t match “Brightness Falls” stylistically, it does explore similar terrain. Once again, McInerney’s real subject is happiness, and whether it can survive the batterings of our restlessness and ambition. On this subject, he is mature and humane, offering considered and convincing analysis instead of familiar novelistic tropes. McInerney is sensitive to arcs, both in characters and in relationships. Russell’s crisis of spirit, as it unfolds over the three books, feels like a natural and uncontrived consequence of a lifetime characterized by buoyant self-satisfaction. He has always been appealing and mostly good-hearted but a little callow, the kind of person who is savvy enough to conceal, even to himself, the fact that he is all too mindful of whose stock is rising and whose is falling. Corrine, who has long floundered professionally, was always the more solid of the two, the more philosophical and self-sufficient, even if she is financially dependent. In “The Good Life,” she met a man who seemed capable of appreciating her in ways that Russell temperamentally could not. “Bright, Precious Days” shows us how that once promising new relationship plays out and how it compares to the older, imperfect but still loving one; on this subject, McInerney is refreshingly clear-eyed.

Still, there’s no dodging the paradox at the heart of his career. Although his best books have never been merely lightweight eighties period pieces, the books set in that decade, and redolent of it, remain his strongest. Something about what he calls the era “of big hair and big shoulder pads” seems to have galvanized McInerney: the buzzing confusions of youth asserting themselves, in narrative vigor, over the wan compromises of age. Perhaps that accounts for the nostalgic mood that pervades “Bright, Precious Days.” As Russell’s friend Washington remarks wistfully, at a dinner party that recalls a more boisterous one from “Brightness Falls,” “We didn’t know it was the eighties at the time. . . . No one told us until about 1987, and by then it was almost over.” ♦