Bright Lights, Big City

"Bright Lights, Big City" is a deeply human and thoughtful story about the foibles of an unnamed narrator (referred to throughout as "you") -- a true everyman on a disillusioned crawl through the seedy Manhattan of the 1980s. He is fed up with the club scene, tired of endlessly prowling for meaningless hookups and his next fix, yet unable to face the empty apartment he calls home. His beautiful wife has left him suddenly. His night life has put his job in jeopardy. His brother keeps leaving him messages that go unanswered. Our narrator knows that he is screwing everything up but can't bring himself to fix any of his problems. Instead, he burrows deeper and deeper into a hell of his own making -- a hell born of profound grief, disillusionment and confusion. McInerney doesn't beat you over the head with over-the-top dramatics; instead, he mesmerizes his readers with a spectacular narrative that feels like a slow burn until the last layer of our narrator's depression has been exposed in a devastatingly sad flashback to something that happened to him a year earlier. What lies beneath his hardened front is heartbreaking and hopelessly real -- and it will not leave you after the last page.

I never understood why critics always want to trash Mc Inerney when his work is so obviously good. This is the book that made me desperate to write in the 2nd person and failed miserably! The characters are both hilarious and tragic and the scenes with the main character at his job as a fact checker seriously made me want to jump out of a window. You can feel this guy's pain in a gripping, terrible way and can understand why he does what he does and becomes a cocaine cripple. The writing is fantastic and evokes a world that truly doesn't exist anymore- New York in the mid 80s. The ending struck me as odd on the 1st read but then I loved it. I've become a real fan of all of Mc Inerney's books and can only imagine that people were jealous of him when he published- that such a young guy could write such an interesting, gripping book. Writers always want to talk trash about other writers it seems and critics love to talk trash about authors. It's their job, unfortunately. But Mc Inerney and Ellis and Jamowitz got all this criticism when I would have given them praise. Read Bright Lights Big City- I dare you to not like it! And also- if you ever wanted to hang out in Manhattan circa 1986, this book might make you want to stay right where you are.

"Bright Lights, Big City" is a short book and reads very quickly. I think this is one of the reasons many critics feel justified in dismissing it. You can read this novel in an afternoon, and perhaps BLBC's digestibility works against it; critics tend to take this slim, sometimes breezy work far too lightly. I am often mystified at the sneering dismissals. What is the objection, exactly? The sophistication of BLBC's prose is something that is hard to argue with: there are lovely sentences and phrases on every page, and the wit is finely modulated, often tempered with a note of scarcely-contained despair. The protagonist is in such spiritual agony that the jokes are never merely flippant; it hurts to laugh when someone is this far down, although laughter is necessary to leaven the starkness of the situation. Maybe some people were turned off by McInerney's use of the second person. When the character is "you," the reader is inevitably going to be aware of a certain friction between their own values/character and the narrator's. What saves BLBC's second-person voice from gimmickry is that the story is universal; we have all, at some point, been at the cusp of a far-reaching disaster, when every moment feels like borrowed time and we live in the dead-zone interstices between day and night. The situation is identifiable; ergo, the second-person is not only seamless -- it is insidious, conspiratorial. Yes, McInerney made a risky choice, but he sustains the "you" conceit very skillfully. What makes BLBC so successful is that it eschews self-indulgence, easy satire, obsessive autobiography. In short, it avoids the usual flaws of the first novel. Instead, it is characterized by modesty and generosity. Generosity is particularly needed by the protagonist, a cocaine-addicted fringe player on New York's literary scene. His life is on the verge of total catastrophe, and he has adopted a fatalistic attitude toward his inevitable unraveling: he doesn't have the energy to try to stop himself from falling. What results is a lost weekend that begins in puerile self-gratification and ends on a note of hope. McInerney doesn't treat his emasculated yuppie with contempt, which is the first instinct with second-rate novelists, filmmakers etc. Instead, he takes the courageous route: he looks at his protagonist's life as a symptom of a wider affliction and indicates a path out of the wilderness. BLBC isn't perfect -- the last twenty or thirty pages turn on a rather unconvincing revelation. McInerney seems to feel the need to give us a single explanation why his protagonist's life is in such disarray. But the "explanation" for the narrator's downfall was already implicit and entirely convincing; you could imagine yourself coming to the same pass given similar circumstances: good money, wilting ideals, a bad marriage, and a steady decline in ambition and prospects. The revelation, which I won't give away, weakened the book significantly, but not enough to make it any less

Bright lights, big city...Where skin-deep is the mode, your traditional domestic values are not going to take root and flourish. -Jay McInerney It seems hard to account for the visceral loathing that Jay McInerney provoked in critics after publishing this best-selling first novel. Here's a typical comment from Weekly Wire: Hot young actor Ethan Hawke's first novel, The Hottest State, is mostly reminiscent of what used to pass for literary writing in the 1980s: a first person narrative of a vapid young man living in New York City, told without allusion, metaphor or self-reference. Essentially, the kind of airport-novel-taken-as-art for which Jay McInerney and Brett Easton Ellis were once praised, and then later reviled. Bad enough to be hammered like that, but to be lumped with the truly awful Bret Easton Ellis? Ouch! Perhaps it was simply the jealousy that authors always seem to feel towards successful fellow writers. Perhaps it was a generational thing; who was this punk kid to replace Hemingway's wine drenched Paris with a coke sprinkled New York? And, of course, his own generation was hardly going to defend an author who told them that they were all shallow and wasting their lives. Whatever the cause, the literary establishment has been so aggressively dismissive of him and this novel that liking it feels almost like a guilty pleasure. But I do like it very much. The book is unusual in that it is written in the second person, which, combined with the tone, makes the whole thing read, appropriately, like an admonishment. It opens in a Manhattan night spot with the line: "You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning." But, of course, that is exactly the type of person that the nameless protagonist of the novel has become, hopping from night club to night club, looking for cocaine and women, with "no goal higher than pursuit of pleasure." He alternately avoids and seeks out his friend Tad Allagash (Tad calls the hero Coach, so we will too) because Tad represents the worst of his own personal tendencies, but is also a ready source of drugs. Coach is well on his way to blowing his job at a magazine that is a hilarious put on of the The New Yorker, with burned out writers haunting the hallways. Eventually he is fired after turning in an error filled piece on France that he was supposed to be fact checking. We also discover that his wife Amanda has recently abandoned him to pursue her modeling career. Coach has taken to wandering by a department store window that has a dress dummy modeled after her. Over the course of several days of avoiding responsibilities and the brother who is trying to contact him, abusing coke & booze at every waking moment, the remainder of Coach's life collapses around him. McInerney's portrait of these young New Yorkers is truly devastating; they are all surface with no depth. Coach remains friendly with Tad because: