Jay McInerney

Published originally as part of the American Vintage Contemporaries series, Jay McInerney’s high octane novel is written from the point of view of a young woman, specifically 21-year old Alison Poole, a rich gorgeous aspiring actress living the cocaine-fueled revved-up life in 1980s Manhattan, a gal who tells her friends how after meeting and spending a night in bed with Dean, her new boyfriend, she is totally in lust. Her friends demand details: length and width.

Every page offers show more penetrating insight into a sociology of identity: all the subtle tricks these rich, beautiful men and women employ to make certain everyone in their elite clique adheres to their embraced surface values. No depth of character or personality, thank you. At one point Alison tell us, “My parents have seven marriages between them and any time I’ve been with a guy for more than a few weeks I find myself looking out the window during sex.” Life as a whirlwind of instant gratification, one hit of skin-tingling pleasure after the other. “Just give me direct contact and you can keep true love.”

And we listen as Alison speaks her mind on the significance of family: “These old novels and plays that always start out with orphans, in the end they find their parents – I want to say, don’t look for them, you’re better off without. Believe me. Get a dog instead. That’s one of my big ambitions in life – to be an orphan. With a trust fund, of course”

She also shares her reflections on men: “Sometimes I think there must be some kind of secret ritual like circumcision where all boys have three-quarters of their brain removed at adolescence, or sense they just have to promise that they’ll act and talk like they’ve been lobotomized, grunt in monosyllables like cavemen, and limit their emotions to the range between A and B. Still, they’re the only other sex we’ve got. And they can make you feel so good sometimes you want to scream.” Alison, you are such a sweetie – too bad our needy human nature requires us to seek fulfillment through others. What a bummer.

One of my favorite scenes: when a group of schoolchildren have the temerity to block Alison’s path “Coming out of the store I got caught in this horrible preteen pedestrian traffic jam from the school down the street. Gremlins. I practically get run over by this tiny kid with a T-shirt that says REALITY IS AN ILLUSION PRODUCED BY ALCOHOL DEFICIENCY. Where was Planned Parenthood when we really needed them?”

A point of heightened drama occurs when a former drug dealer by the name of Mannie, knife in hand, crashes one of their parties to proclaim his love to Alison’s sister Rebecca, who at the moment is leaning over a mirror and snorting a line of cocaine. Mannie screams that he will hurt himself if Rebecca doesn’t come with him. Rebecca simply replies, “Be my guest.” Following a violent exchange between Mannie and the other guys at the party, Mannie flings himself out the 6th floor window. Rebecca and all the others get really pissed off since they have to stop taking drugs and clean up in preparation for the police knocking at their door.

What I find so fascinating about this novel is not only Alison’s numerous one-liners - “It’s like nothing can touch us as long as we stay high” - but how life dedicated to pleasure-seeking plays itself out among the super-wealthy, uninhibited sexually-obsessed. Such a philosophy of bold sensual hedonism hearkens back to a school of ancient Greek philosophy - the Cyrenaics, who valued a person’s own physical and bodily pleasure as the highest good.

Returning to our first-person narrator Alison, are we being completely fair if we hurl harsh judgements her way? Toward the end of the novel, she reports how her father’s key business associate attempted to rape her as a young girl and how when she reported this incident to her father, he told her to simply forget it. Sadly, Alison also recollects how her father would walk into her bedroom and join her in bed. It is only one short line in the novel (perhaps a revealing narrative slip?) but it speaks volumes to the probability of sexual abuse and its devastating psychological consequences. show less

“Your brain at this moment is composed of brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers. They are tired and muddy from their long march through the night. There are holes in their boots and they are hungry. They need to be fed. The need the Bolivian Marching Powder.” Quote from the opening scene of this 1984 Jay McInerney novel told in cool, hip, drug-hyped second person. But, alas, this is merely the surface.

Each time I read this book, I comprehend more clearly how the words on every page have show more sharp razor-like edges that cut into the heart of the narrator. However, to say specifically why this is so would be to say too much since the more complete story of what the narrator is going through is not disclosed until the closing chapters.

Below are my comments coupled with one-line snappers from the novel’s main character, a 24-year old coke-snorting would-be writer working as a fact-checker for a New Yorker-like magazine and living in a downtown apartment by himself after Amanda, his fashion model wife, called telling him she isn’t coming back and he will be hearing from her lawyer to settle the divorce:

“The girl with the shaved head has a scar tattooed on her scalp. It looks like a long, sutured gash. You tell her it is very realistic. She takes this as a compliment and thanks you. You meant as opposed to romantic. “I could use one of those right over my heart,” you say.” ---------- The narrator’s words foreshadow how he really isn’t after the thrills of the hip scene but something emotionally deeper and much more personal. I can appreciate how many dislike the novel and the whining, distressed voice of the narrator since, in many respects, his emotional turmoil is similar to that other sensitive, distraught, whining 16-year old back in the late 1940s – Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger’s classic.

“It’s 10:58. You’ve worn out the line about the subway breaking down. Maybe tell Clara you stopped to take a free look at Kinky Karla and got bitten by her snake.” --------- Clara is the narrator’s boss at the fact finding department; Kinky Karla and her snake one of the thrills the old street hawkers hawk out on the street. Both of these worlds – the clock-driven, drab, humdrum office and the blaring girls-girls--girls sleaze – are exactly what the narrator in his current anguished state does not need.

“There was a cartoon you used to watch with a time-traveling turtle and a benevolent wizard. The turtle would journey back to say, the French revolution, inevitably getting in way over his head. At the last minute, when he was stretched out under the guillotine, he would cry out, “Help, Mr. Wizard!” And the wizard, on the other end of the time warp, would wave his wand and rescue the hapless turtle.” ---------- Ha! A common wish, particularly among young adults, to be saved from the need to do a 9-5 pressure-cooker job. All of my education for this? Mr. Wizard, please get me the hell out of here! Sorry, life isn’t a cartoon – you will have to find your own way out.

“You insert another piece of paper, again you type the date. At the left margin you type, “Dear Amanda,” but when you look at the paper it reads, “Dead Amanda.” Screw this. You are not going to commit any great literature tonight.” ---------- So telling. Writing fiction nearly always requires an emotional distance; when one is undergoing extreme personal upset, such as our novel’s narrator, it is next to impossible to move past drafting the first paragraph.

“Wade saunters in and stops in front of your desk. He looks at you and clicks his tongue. “What kind of flowers do you want on your grave? I already have the epitaph: He didn’t face facts.” -------- This exchange after the narrator, by his own admission, completely screwed up in performing his job. His refusal to face and deal with his life beyond the office gives an ironic twist to 'He didn’t face facts'.

“When you first came to the city you spent a night here with Amanda. You have friends to stay with but you wanted to spend that first night at the Plaza. . . . Your tenth-floor room was tiny and overlooked an airshaft; though you could not see the city out the window, you believed that it was spread out at your feet. The limousines around the entrances seemed like carriages, and you felt that someday one would wait for you. Today they put you in mind of carrion birds, and you cannot believe your dreams were so shallow. ---------- Such is the truth of the city: if you have money and are on the rise, the Big Apple is a dream come true; if you are penniless and on the skids, it quickly turns into a cold, cruel deathtrap.

This was Jay McInerney’s first novel. He went on to write a half a dozen more, but none having nearly the hype and fame as this one. Curiously, from what I gather, Jay has spent much of the last thirty years attempting to separate his personal identity from the identity of this novel’s narrator. Such is the power of literature. show less

While reading Bright Nights, Big City you want to call its protagonist a sucker. He buys fake Rolex watches, falls for fake schemes, follows around false friends, and believes a model could love him enough to stay married until death do them part. You want to call him a loser because you know there isn't a happy ending for this guy. Drugs constantly addle his mind to the point where he loses his fact checking job, loses his freak friends, and nearly loses his mind. What he doesn't realize is show more that he has a lot to mourn. He is literally drowning his deep seeded grief over losing his mother to cancer in an avalanche of cocaine and bright lights. The end comes when rock bottom is met and he has an awakening of sorts. show less

You are not the type of reader to read a book like this. Even in secret, as a guilty pleasure, something hidden when not in use beneath the floorboards, like porn, or a dead body. You're definitely not the type of reader to be caught on a street corner outside a bar drunk off your obnoxious, narcissistic hind like (you-know-who in the book) at six in the morning, Tuesday morning, that is.

No, you're too good to read this, Bright Lights, Big City, a book whose plot is solely "Snort Snort" and show more "Wham! Bam! Thank You Skank!" A book that probably would never have been published in the first place, like McInerney's true first novel, Ransom, that didn't see the bright lights of day until after what was marketed as his first novel - BL,BC - hit The Big Apple with such promo-campaign-tsunamic-intensity like it were something from The Day After, had it been narrated conventionally in the first person or, hmmm, even the third person, the way most good writers narrate their novels.

But, by narrating BL,BC in the second person (ingenious, the veritable Ponzi "literary" scheme of Bright Lights, Big City; oh the gargantuan marketing gimmick of King Kongish dimensions: It's you, readers, get it? As if you're the ones in the story narrating the novel from your very own personal perspective! Get it? That's the second person for you!)

But the only story, turns out, is you the gullible public, circa those excessive, reckless 80s, willing to swallow just about anything as long as it was advertised right, no matter how sloppily huge the husk, engorged with nothing substantive, not even hot air, turned out to be; engorged with, well, the vacuous contents of Bright Lights, Big City - an erectile dysfunction of a novel if there ever was one, in that it never gets to a point. I mean, let's get real, you and me, there's no way the male characters in BL,BC (I don't care how unconsciously coked-up they were!) could've gotten it up (their penises) and kept them up as lonnnnnng as they did having consumed so much booze on so little sleep for nights on end without being Viagra'd- or Cialis'd-up, and those drugs weren't even invented then, so it's anatomically impossible, in my biological opinion, their excessive sexual escapades. Either that or I'm (or you're) jealous!

Regardless, you do not want to read this book, with its tired and true clubbing cliches; with its tired and true cocaine cliches; no, trust me, you do not. You don't want to read it because Bright Lights, Big City is to gimmick (and not to gorgeous prose) what The One Eyed, One Horned, Flying Purple People Eater is to novelty-song (and not to Stairway to Heaven, say.)

There's novelty-songs (do you remember PacMan Fever and Valley Girl?), and then there's novelty-novels (do you remember Bright Lights, Big City, that gimmicky novel from the 1980s written in the second person?) You don't remember it? Well aren't you fortunate! Consider yourself blessed! What you really want to read next is Infinite Jest with Le Salon Litteraire du Peuple pour le Peuple, in March 2010, don't you? A book, btw, that Jay McInerney once reviewed and "didn't get". Well, you are not the kind of reader who will "get" Jay McInerney, either. show less