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:
Just now you want to stay at the surface of things, and Tad is a figure skater who never considers the sharks under the ice. You have friends who actually care about you and speak the language of the inner self. You have avoided them of late. Your soul is as disheveled as your apartment, and until you clean up a little you don't want to invite anyone inside.
Coach had doubts about marrying Amanda because:
You did not feel that you could open quite all of your depths to her, or fathom hers, and sometimes you feared she didn't have any depths.
Meanwhile, he finds himself asking, "when did she become a mannequin?", because she is little different than her fiberglass doppelganger in the store display. When he meets her in a nightclub at the end of the novel, she is with an impossibly handsome young man who she claims is her fiancé, but he turns out to be an escort. The woman Coach is dancing with that night turns out to be transsexual. Noone is real, like the neon lighting in which their lives unfold everything is artificial; at best they are playing roles, at worst they are truly empty at the core (they have become the "Men without Chests" that C.S. Lewis warned of). Coach himself frames the episodes in his life as chapters from a novel, complete with titles. It's as if he is incapable of handling reality and must make a fiction of his own life, must turn himself into a literary construct.
Finally, as he hits bottom, Coach begins to rebound. His brother catches up to him and they discuss the loss of their Mother, who sickened and died a year earlier. Coach is, at last, able to confront his own sense of loss. He calls an old girlfriend and tells her: "I was just thinking that we have a responsibility to the dead--the living, I mean." The novel ends with him down at the docks, trading his sunglasses for some fresh baked bread. Hard to avoid pedantry here, but the bread pretty obviously represents the Staff of Life, the values of the heartland and the pleasures of hearth and home, as well as a means of resurrection--in the most fundamental sense, he is taking communion. Coach's decision to abandon the bright lights (he won't need the sunglasses anymore) and turn back towards the basics is a triumphal moment in modern fiction.
In an era when "white bread" has become pejorative, an author who has his hero saved by a bread roll is obviously trying to communicate something. It would be a shame if those same shallow folk whom the book is aimed at were to succeed in dismissing it as no more than a "drug book". It is a really fine novel and one of the few significant social fictions, along with Bonfire of the Vanities and Love Always (Ann Beattie), to emerge from the 80's.
GRADE: A
