Hi all. So I think I've stopped kidding myself that I might regularly update this blog anytime soon. I'll try not to forget about it, but no promises. In the meantime, I came across a hurried and now-slightly-obsolete book review I wrote last year for the thirtieth anniversary of a novel I really, really like (for some strange reason). Honestly, I can't even remember if this is the edited version or the unpolished first draft. I'm pretty suspicious it's the latter. That beginning is just so high-school-writing-assignment. But I couldn't quite relegate it to the depths of my filing cabinet just yet, so I figured I might as well post it. If anyone out there reads this, thanks for indulging me. Please enjoy.
Love,
TCD
Love,
TCD
‘All messed up and no place to go’: revisiting Bright Lights, Big City
“You are not the kind of guy who
would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are…”
Thus begins Jay McInerney’s bestselling
debut novel, Bright Lights, Big City.
This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the book’s publication. This
dizzying work could have easily become a footnote in the history of American
popular fiction. Some may argue that, in fact, it has. But Bright Lights, Big City remains one of the most enduring and
best-remembered novels of the Reagan era. That fact raises an important
question: Why?
It’s still often cited as one of
the few widely known American novels written in second person. The story’s
protagonist is “You,” and McInerney handles the device surprisingly well. The
unconventional voice connects us more fully to the narrator, but it also
furthers the sort of manic, stream-of-consciousness feel of the narrative. The
novel is, essentially, the troubled protagonist’s conversation with himself.
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Pictured: the titular big
city
Not pictured: titular
bright lights, the ’80s, ennui
|
Beyond its atypical format, the book is remembered as a work of its own time. It is, after all, a quintessentially '80s novel. The events and places of Bright Lights, Big City almost couldn’t have existed at any other point in history. Sure, New York will always be New York. But McInerney’s typewriters and neon, free-flowing drugs and yuppie solipsism, characters’ vain attempts at both the brass ring of respectability and the gratification of every wild desire— all of these elements coexisting anywhere outside of the 1980s would feel anachronistic at best.
While Bright Lights probably couldn’t be set in the present day, it could certainly have been written now. The novel is as engaging
and entertaining today as it ever was, and the emotions our narrator elicits
are timeless. McInerney manages to resist dating his work by perfectly
capturing the zeitgeist of the 1980s without losing sight of the universal
truths of the lived human experience.
Bright
Lights, Big City is the story of “You,” a well-educated twenty-something
man trying to live a slightly artsier version of the American Dream. You work
as a fact-checker at a New Yorkeresque
magazine, but your true passion is writing. Your supermodel wife Amanda has
recently left you, and you’re devastated, but you try to hide your pain from
others and from yourself. Your best friend is Tad Allagash, who, you admit,
isn’t “necessarily the man for a heart-to-heart, but indispensible in a party
situation.” You lead a raucous, decadent social life, and you try to distract
yourself from your marital separation, the relatively recent death of your
mother, dissatisfaction with your job, and a sort of ever-present
world-weariness. You abuse drugs regularly and publicly, and have become
dependent on them. You seem aware that you’ve entered a downward spiral, and
while you’re intensely unhappy with your current situation, a way out seems
impossible. But Allagash
introduces you to his cousin Vicky, and you start to fall for her. Your inner
turmoil continues to rule your life and control your actions, but as time goes
on, you begin to discover the things that matter. I don’t want to give too much
away, but by the end of the novel, it seems you’ve found a path toward a healthier,
happier way to live.
A reader might be forgiven for
thinking of Bright Lights, Big City
as a bit of a trashy summer paperback, a guilty pleasure at best. McInerney’s
New York might be a hedonistic playground where drugs, sex, cash, and status
reign, and the author takes some fond looks at the shallow club scene he
chronicles. But this novel is more complex that that. It’s not the unqualified
paean to '80s excess that some remember it to be, but a more nuanced assessment
of modern society. The protagonist longs to escape the partly self-imposed
emptiness of his situation. By the end of the novel, he seems desperate to
transcend the bonds of the material realm altogether: “You wish this laughter
could lift you out of your heavy body and carry you beyond this place, out
through an open window and up over the city until all this ugliness and pain
were reduced to a twinkling of faraway lights.” Ultimately, it’s implied, the
protagonist chooses a life of love over a life of excess.
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I hope you’re happy, McInerney. Rereading this review gave
me a
ridiculous croissant craving.
I couldn’t justify a copy
of the Times though.
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This isn’t a perfect novel, of course. There’s some casual but noticeable sexism, for example, and it’s unclear if we’re supposed to identify with those sentiments or consider them among the protagonist’s flaws. Overall though, he’s a sympathetic character. There’s something weirdly loveable about a man who views his constant partying as “an experiment in limits, reminding yourself of who you aren’t.” He thinks of himself as “the kind of guy who wakes up early on Sunday morning and steps out to cop the Times and croissants.” By the end of the novel, this self-image is still far from accurate. But he’s found his way to a middle path. Neither the empty nihilism of the nightclub, nor the yuppie embrace of corporate slavery, but a place of healing, belonging, and maybe even peace. Unlike other novels of the period, Bright Lights is deeply affecting. It’s aging gracefully because it does what so many great books do. It reminds us who we were, who we are, and who we want to be.
September 2014
NB: Yes, I'm using a 10 year old photo I took in New York, and, no, it doesn't really have that much to do with the review, but forget it, Jake; it's Chinatown. Actually, it's not, but we did get lost in Chinatown on the same trip from the photo. Not the same Chinatown from Chinatown. That's in Los Angeles. Though I once got a bit lost there too...
