What complicates matters is they aren't a tenth as rich as the people they hang out with. She wants to move out of their small in-need-of-work apartment in downtown Manhattan to suburbia - or at least Harlem - while Russell hangs on to the illusion that Manhattan is still the edgy, "shining island of letters where Hemingway had punched O'Hara and Ginsberg seduced Kerouac".
Everyone around them owns theirs - many have several - but Russell has been too busy line-editing fiction to delve into the real estate market or notice his wife's increasing unhappiness. Still, four-time married McInerney, 61, (most recently to publishing heiress Anne Hearst) is an eternal optimist when it comes to fictional affairs of the heart.
Chapter two opens with a quaint homily (cribbed from Shakespeare's Coriolanus): "The best marriages, like the best boats are the ones which ride out the storms" but bad weather's coming: a career-defining mistake on Russell's part and the 2008 global financial crisis, chief among them.
And, in case you missed it with all the gossip and glitz, McInerney gets Russell to voice the novel's theme explicitly: Art and Love versus Power and Money.
Russell's still the alpha-editor busy running his own publishing house (thanks to the largesse of a wealthy friend) when he's not walking three blocks for his coffee or popping into Chinatown for the best star anise.
But our first glimpse of him - a flirty lunch with a fawning young journalist who invites him to suck hamburger grease off her fingers (he complies) - does little to suggest he's changed from the unfaithful husband we met in The Good Life, even if he magnanimously declines her invitation for an afternoon tryst at the Chelsea Hotel.
He later goes home and makes love to his wife for the first time in months suffering a panic attack, or, as McInerney describes it, "a glimpse of oblivion". Meanwhile, Corrine is now a screenwriter - she's adapted Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter to middling acclaim - but spends most of her time helping out at a non-profit or attending black-tie charity events with Russell, the cause of which she rarely knows. Presumably the nanny's at home looking after the in-vitro sourced, (Corrine's crazy sister) pre-teen kids.
Soon she's got the lascivious attention of private-equity zillionaire Luke McGavock (Team Power and Money and the man she nearly left Russell for in The Good Life) to deal with after he returns, newly married, from his South African vineyard.
Mash-up a 19th century novel of manners and a Nancy Meyers movie and you're close. Yet even as he joins their ranks, McInerney remains a razor-sharp satirist of the ultra-privileged aughts Manhattanite; an anorexic woman is described as "a bejewelled Giacometti in a canary yellow dress" which is good, but better when McInerney goes on to tell us that she's standing beside an actual Brancusi.
Another jaded millionaire provides Russell the formula with which to calculate the perfect age for a second wife (half yours plus six). Romantics will read it for the love story; cynics scour it for proof McInerney's lost his touch (not entirely), and sociologists may well put the trilogy on some future reading-list when studying pre-revolutionary Manhattan.
Others will forgive its flaws: an episodic, disjointed narrative, an odd detour into Russell's friend Washington's continuing affair and the presence of one too many drug-addled writers/artists - and applaud McInerney's old-fashioned belief that Love and Art can defy both time and money.
Bright, Precious Days
by Jay McInerney
(Bloomsbury, $33)
