Jay McInerney's novel Brightness Falls portrays the life of a young middle class couple in pursuit of attaining the American dream in urban America in the 1980's. The novel follows the couple, Russell and Corrine Calloway, as well as their friends in their middle and upper class social circles, as they struggle with such social issues as adultery, drug addiction, ambition, corruption, and failure. McInerney uses literary elements such as setting to develop the novel's plot and to portray an accurate social satire on middle and upper class America. The most prominent settings used to depict character conflict and development, moods, and themes are New York, St. Maarten, and the Hamptons. Each of these settings helps define thematic topics and examines the development of each character in relation to their environment.
             The main setting in Brightness Falls is New York City, where the Calloways live in their small, but fashionable one bedroom apartment. In New York, Corrine works as a stock broker on Wall Street, while Russell works as a publisher for Corbin and Dern. Russell and Corrine are viewed by their friends as the impenetrable golden couple, who's love would never die. However, as the novel progresses their love and trust for each other slowly disintegrates because of the corruption of life in New York City. " Corrine and Russell had been married for five years. They'd known each other eight years before that, having met in college. Their friends viewed them as savvy pioneers of the matrimonial state, as if they had homesteaded one of those formerly marginal areas of the city into which the fashion-conscious were just now beginning to follow. In the years they'd lived in New York, their East Side apartment had become a supper club for their less settled acquaintances, a sort of model unit for those thinking of buying into the neighborhood of matrimony. For the recently conjoined, it was a sa...