Customer Reviews

Bright Lights, Big City

5 star:		(44)
4 star:		(32)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

"Here you go again. All messed up and no place to go."

That line sets the tone for "Bright Lights, Big City." Jay McInerney's bestselling debut stands above other urban-angst novels of the time, which tended to go with shock value. Instead, McInerney experimented with second-person narratives and a vision of a fragmented, coke-dusted New York.

"You" are a young man living in New York, and wife Amanda has recently left you for a French photographer she met on a modelling shoot. Understandably you are depressed and unhappy, and the loss of Amanda haunts your moods, especially when her lawyer urges you to sue her for "sexual abandonment," even though you don't want a divorce.

By day, you work in the fact-checking department of a prestigious magazine, where your malignant boss is getting tired of you. By night, you halfheartedly prowl clubs with your pal Tad, doing drugs and meeting women you care nothing for. Will you be able to move past your problems and become happy again?

Consider that summary a little slice of what "Bright Lights, Big City" sounds like -- the reader is the main character, which allows the reader to slip into another's skin for a brief time. Second-person narratives are often annoying, but McInerney's style is so starkly compelling that the little narrative trick pays off.

The New York of "Bright Lights, Big City" is basically a big, glitzy, hollow place, but still strangely appealing. And McInerney adds splinters of reality here and there, like the tattooed girl and Coma Baby, which add to the gritty you-are-there feel of the novel itself. His dark sense of humour comes out in "your" thoughts: "your" boss resembles "one of those ageless disciplinarians who believe that little boys are evil and little girls frivolous, that an idle mind is the devil's playground."

And while many trendy novels of the time relied on shock value and obnoxious characters, McInerney keeps it low-key. The young man is likable and sympathetic, despite his tendency towards self-pity. And the people around him -- the self-absorbed Amanda, likable Tad and nasty "Clingwrap" -- seem surprisingly realistic, as well as the minor people who flit in and out of our hero's vision.

"Bright Lights, Big City" has gained a reputation as a trendy urban novel of the 1980s. Too bad. Though the trendiness has worn off, McInerney's style and story are still worth reading.

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

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.

Mcinerney is the most talented of the "Brat Pack" era of writers who rose up in and around New York City in the ultra-materialistic 1980's, and Bright Lights, Big City goes a long way toward demonstrating that. Written in the second-person rather the otherwise de rigueur first or third, this novel is the story of a young man's plummet from the life to which he'd always dreamed (position at a prestigious literary magazine, beautiful wife, friends in the social in-class) to a nagging, tormented hell in which each new day greets him with the mocking revelation of what he has become. This character, primarily called simply "You" throughout the book, is burnt-out professionally and socially. His cocaine usage has surpassed destructive levels, the wife whom he brought to the city from a rural dead-end life is divorcing him, and the first-anniversary of his mother's death (which he has so far avoided dealing with via drugs and the fast life) is approaching and with it an obligatory meeting with the family he's tried hard to leave behind.

Is this the study of a soul doomed beyond reprieve to post-modern Hell, or is it the bitter darkness before the dawn? At novel's end we are left with reasons to hope it is the latter, and as we depart from the story within this barely-more-than-a-novella, we want the young man with whom we've spent the last hundred-some pages to cling to the possible escape Mcinerney has set just within his reach.

One can read Bright Lights, Big City in about as long as it takes to sit through the less-worthy film version. I'd recommend the chilly gut-punch of Mcinerney's prose to anyone who appreciates the future classics among late-twentieth century literature.

In a second person voice Jay McInerney does the near-impossible and writes the great all-american novel for his generation. This is a style which is strange at first, but draws you into the story just the same. If any writer has done more to capture the pulse and spirit of the 80's then I can't figure who that might be. Using a young yuppie writer's struggles with love, career, family and cocaine he speeds the reader through several manic chapters until low and behold, the book is over and you're wanting more. The manic pace is what makes this book work so well. The movie starring Michael J. Fox and Phoebe Cates follows the book well and wins points as a good book-to-film movie (unlike so many others). The paradox here is how a writer can say so much in so few pages. It's also the only book I know of where the first chapter could serve as a great short story all on its own. Prepare for an entertaining and wild ride, you may just recognize some people you know....

Tracing a few days in the life of a 24-year-old writer whose brain is frequently inhabited by "brigades of Bolivian soldiers...tired and muddy from their long march through the night," Jay McInerney takes the reader into the world of cocaine, club-hopping (at the "right" clubs), casual sex, avoidance of responsibility, and full-time self-indulgence in the early 1980s. With absurd humor, he satirizes the "high" life of New York City and the non-stop action and party scene of young professionals whose frantic activity keeps them from having to deal with the real world.

The unnamed main character becomes the reader as the author uses the second person point of view, telling the story as "you" go to work and clubs, and jaunt around the city. "You" work for a magazine at which no one has ever been fired, and where old, burnt-out columnists maunder in the hallways (a satire of The New Yorker, perhaps). "Your" immediate assignment is to translate and fact-check an article about the French elections by a deadline that "you" cannot possibly meet.

Gradually, "your" story unfolds. Your marriage to Amanda, a fashion model from the Midwest, has collapsed after less than a year--you are devastated by her desertion, and you have told no one of your divorce. Your article for the magazine is a disaster. You avoid dealing with these issues and the death of your mother (more than a year ago) by creating a new reality for yourself through cocaine. The turning point of the action comes with the arrival of your brother Michael, who summons you back home for your mother's memorial service and the scattering of her ashes.

It is difficult to write a novel that focuses on shallow people living shallow lives without having the novel be shallow, but McInerney's point of view forces the reader to identify with the main character, and his uncompromising vision of this empty life, which he presents with absurd humor, is entertaining. Similes and metaphors here are sometimes over-the-top. ("Her voice was like the New Jersey state anthem played through an electric shaver." Tad is "a figure skater who never considers the sharks under the ice.") But these provide some variety within McInerney's short, staccato sentences, most of which march along like the "Bolivian soldiers." A snapshot of New York life in the early 1980s, Bright Lights, Big City is a landmark novel for its insights into an era. n Mary Whipple

"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 than a minor classic. "Bright Lights, Big City" is an original, compassionate and wickedly funny riff on a decade that deserves to be re-examined, reviled, but never, never relived.

Also recommended: THE LOSERS' CLUB by Richard Perez

You first heard about this book in a creative writing workshop, and you made a mental note to eventually get your hands on it and read it. You order it from the library; for some reason the book wasn't on the shelf, perhaps someone nicked it. You end up ordering it on inter-library loan to the dismay of booksellers. You read it cover to cover, and then, like an addict, you read it again since it's on interlibrary loan, and it won't be handy unless you go whole hog and place another Amazonian order.

You reflect on the advantages of writing in the second person. You think, it's not a bad way of getting inside someone's head. Of course, you know that you're not exactly the un-named character. You wonder if the un-named character is actually Jay McInerney. Perhaps the quantity of cocaine used has been exaggerated. It's tricky writing second person fiction. You almost forget what you're doing and write and word that is homonymous with eye.

You know what is special about this book? The geography of New York, especially references to the World Trade Centre...and the familiar interior monologues dealing with one's hopes and dreams for the future...newlywed stuff. You might not have been exposed to this party lifestyle if you were like me, a systems analyst, who had to go into work every day. But it's not bad to see how the other half live...Cheers.

"Bright Lights, Big City" is notable only for its second-person narrative, a device that would have been interesting in the hands of a more skilled author; with McInerney, however, it comes off as little more than a cute trick. This book somehow manages the feat of reflecting the shallowness of 80s yuppie culture without offering a single perceptive observation about it. Indeed, this may be the only book ever written specifically for shallow yuppies who have never read a book and will never read another one. The main character's "rebirth" at the end is trite beyond belief. (He walks past a bakery and smells bread. It smells "wholesome," so he trades in a yuppie status symbol for a loaf and eats it, thus saving his soul. Get it?) The great modern American novel about a young man at war with himself in the Big City remains "The Catcher in the Rye." This book isn't a tenth of Salinger's masterpiece.

Reading this 15 years after it was written, I was struck by how quintessentially '80's this story is. The values, the slang, and the obsessions are a snapshot of the period. I lived in metropolitan NY at the time and was surprised by how distasteful I found McInerney's somewhat exaggerated, but none the less fairly accurate, portrayal of a particularly shallow period in the nation's most self absorbed city.

Probably in the mid-80's reading about the carpe diem decadence of Manhattan yuppies was more entertaining than it is now; today this novel's satire and irony are mildly amusing, but hardly uproarious. While I recognize the point was to develop frustration and a lack of sympathy for the self destruction and self pity of the protagonist, I simply got grossed out reading about excessive snorting of cocaine, imbibing of vodka, and sleep deprivation. After the author made the point he proceeded to beat it to death to the point where it was beyond any credibility. The point, I realize, was to emphasize the incredible self indulgence and aimless waste that characterized this group during the era; however, it starts to d r a g.

After I had found myself plodding through about midway into the novel the complexity developed and some of the earlier metaphors became more self evident. Fortunately it's a short book because I was ready to give up, but reading the second half I was glad that I didn't. The last third is thought provoking, and moving, with a significant message.

I began this with expectations to be highly entertained by a witty, sardonic period piece. Instead, I found it generally an unsettling reflection of a recent era and specifically a tale which touched me.