In the late summer of 1984, Nancy Reagan was bringing it up.Just Say No” campaign For would-be teenage drug hunters across the country, the publishing world was transformed by a first novel in the midst of a fleeting, feverish ecstasy. Yes. Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City” arrived 40 years ago this week with an initial print run of 15,000 and a hard-to-imagine future.
Perhaps you were present at the creation, young, living in New York and known more for your literary pose — like the book’s nameless hero, a mostly strung-out, sullen research assistant at a patrician literary magazine. If you were, you probably weren’t impressed.
Maybe you weren’t impressed. For some, initial revulsion was created by the novel’s signature narrative device, or gimmick depending on your point of view – the story was told in the second person. “You’re talking to a girl with a shaved head in a nightclub,” our cocaine-addled fact-checker tells us on the first page. “You shake a healthy nostril with the back of your hand.” McInerney arrived on the scene with a party-boy persona of his own, making it all too easy to think about that third bottle of Krug coming to the table – writing a note to himself on the back of his cleverness when he woke up the next afternoon somewhere in Soho next to a beautiful woman. A $50 bill to remind. Tammy? Tamsin? He wouldn’t remember.
All the speculation invited by the author’s emerging tabloid celebrity made it all too easy to dismiss the originality of the plot, to ignore the sly utility of a form that created a necessary distance not only between the narrator and his inner self, but more crucially. The narrator and his audience. Even if he suffers a setback that might otherwise evoke sympathetic feelings—a firing at the hands of a pushy, devious boss; It’s hard to shake the idea that the volatile divide marked by proto-ghosting — until the distance narrows, until it’s not possible — is fundamentally ridiculous.
The book’s significant emotional impact rests on a distinct shift in the character’s understanding—a shift from disgust to his nihilistic attitude to compassion for pain, which is gradually revealed to be his underlying cause. A shallow 24-year-old, traipsing through the night caves of Lower Manhattan, driven not by the world-weary boredom of post-adolescent self-esteem, we learn, but by recent and serious loss, a grief immune to the 1980s in all the ways he has tried to please him.
That “Bright Lights, Big City” succeeds as a psychologically meaningful coming-of-age story and a kind of satirical picaresque is certainly the reason it endures. The book has sold nearly a million copies and has never been out of print. McInerney’s editor, Gary FisketjohnA friend from his days at Williams College acquired it for $7,500, he told me recently; It originated as a short story in The Paris Review, and he doubted that the second-person voice could survive the length of a novel.
When it was finished, he shared the manuscript with a good friend, editor Morgan Enterkin. “I said, ‘This book is going to change your life,'” Entrekin, Grove Atlantic’s longtime publisher, recently recalled. “What I thought at the time was that it was a serious book, a social novel. In the 70s, fiction moved away from that. The social novel was left to the likes of the people Judith Krantz“
The world had changed so much that the genre was primed for revival. Tom Wolfe would debut his fiction three years later, in 1987, with “Bonfire of the Vanities,” an exploration of wealth and class in the city, broader in both its ambition and geographic scope, more in line with various recurring rivalries. But McInerney’s novel, a downtown comedy of the same vintage as Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours,” was a premonition of where all the baddies and lost time in the late ’70s and early ’80s were headed. Ordering sweetbreads at will change soon enough OdeonTwo hours ago the gate came down at 4 am
Preppies will move from their “Bolivian Marching Powder” to Guatemalan fair trade coffee; The savages they slept with would be turned into tamer surrogates, experts on co-op board bylaws and arbitrage opportunities. By the end of the novel, our hero has fixed himself sexually—over the trashy model who finally ditches him for Paris, he’s drawn to a caring graduate student working on a philosophy degree at Princeton.
If Wolfe documented the immediate present, McInerney managed to capture the very near future—a moment of transition in the city, between art and money, between the reign of chaotic bohemian creativity and the religion of leveraged buyouts. Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street” premiered in December 1987. Jean-Michel Basquiat Eight months later, aged 27, Great would die in his apartment on Jones Street.
“Have you ever considered doing an MBA?” Alex, a once-important editor, asks an alcoholic over lunch, before warning our hero not to be “tempted by all that nonsense about the Garretts.” Alex doesn’t instruct her to get down to business. “But write about it,” he suggests. “That’s the subject now. People who understand business will write new literature.” More specifically, the new literature will be concerned with “technology, the global economy, electronic flows and wealth flows”. If nothing else, “Bright Lights, Big City” seems to have predicted the career of Michael Lewis.
Alex believes literature is dead. Fortunately McInerney was not. There is no longer much debate about the book’s place in the pantheon of great New York City novels. appears on it Lists All of them time. But it wasn’t necessarily predictable at the outset. Writing in The New York Review of Books in 1984, critic Daryl Pinckney observed, “The city, as theater of experience, as refuge, as hiding place, has in turn been replaced by an abstract, fast lane.”
McInerney may have lived in it, but he wasn’t trying to convince anyone to join him. The fast lane is neither romanticized nor given to moral scrutiny. Instead of existing as an abstraction in the book, it comes as close as possible to being depicted as a literal place. All the vice courses through it are just a passageway, the lane you occupy before entering a more orderly one – the lane into which the entire urban universe, post-AIDS, pro-yoga – has finally merged.
The last few pages of “Bright Lights, Big City” find a very early rise from the netherworld on a Sunday morning — a resurrection — into a place where, for vivid New York, you might mistake it for anywhere else on earth. With his nose dry and ready for his redemption, he sees a delivery driver loading a bread truck. He asks for something to eat, but the driver refuses, so he offers him his Ray-Bans. The driver agrees to take them and throws away a bag of hard rolls in return, but without first informing him that he is crazy. We are definitely in a city where everything has a price.
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