Rating: 
Summary: 'A Catcher in the Rye' for Generation X
Review: 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....
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Summary: This book is depressing.
Review: I just read a review of this book in which the author stated that he loved it. He raved about how "fun" of a book it was. Quite the contrary. Quite. I loved the book too, but for different reasons. Bright Lights, Big City was about a lost soul in the depressing eighties. Glitz and glamour and decadence. He was lost in it. Like all of us. And he had a major drug addiction. It wasn't "fun." Was it fun when he coughed and coughed and then found himself with a bloody nose? You don't notice that these problems in his life are serious because of the use of second person. When something happens to you, you are too close to it, you can't see what happens. I got completely wrapped up in that frame of mind and didn't realize until the last chapter that the only thing he had consumed all weekend was crack. Very clever on McInerney's part. I liked the book. Oh, and to the person who wrote that review, I am in a college class and it was on the curriculum. I guess schools are getting a little more liberal!
Rating: 
Summary: Timeless
Review: At once meaningless, yet meaning laden, Bright Lights Big City is an allegory for our times.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, mildly overrated
Review: "Bright Lights, Big City" is a good novel, but not quite the masterpiece some people say it is. BLBC is often funny and never boring, and shows that second-person narration can be quite effective. The hero was dumped by his wife who pursued a modeling career, and his party habits (which include lots of cocaine) are preventing him from being competent at his job, which becomes less and less important to him. Reading this novel, I wish there would have been more of Tad Allagash, one of the hero's friends, who unfortunately is much more interesting than the hero himself. I thought too much time was spent on the hero obsessing over his ex-wife, time that could have been spent on the hero's and Tad's fast-living New York lifestyle. Even so, there is much to be admired. Anyone who has ever had a cocaine habit will identify with these characters, and the ending of the book is an emotional powerhouse, all the more amazing because of its simplicity. Even though it is far from perfect, reading "Bright Lights, Big City" is time well spent.
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Summary: describe a broken heart
Review: This books describes a person with a broken heart and how it really feels. It also describes the ups and downs of starting out on your own after college. I love this book!
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Summary: Absolutely perfect
Review: This book is sheer beauty. Jay McInerney has ineffably captured the rogue spirit and disillusionment of the decadent 1980s, and has honed a sincere, manic story that defines an indelible era of American history.
The protagonist of the story is yourself, and McInerney's deft and forceful use of the second-person narrative gives the story an added emotional punch. As a factual verificationist at a reputable New York magazine, you shuffle through a self-purported banal existence, wallowing in your misery for Amanda, your model wife who has abruptly left you for equivocal reasons. Your ultra-hip and hedonist friend Tad Allagash has your back though, and leads the way through New York City's finest, most dissolute settlements where you find solace in the embrace of various self-forgetting debaucheries.
Read this novel right now. I have just finished it and I am thinking of reading it again. This is how good it is. It is short, possibly the only carp I can muster from it, and you will be done with it and wanting more before the impact even sinks in.
Rating:
Summary: Its Length Only Makes it Better.
Review: The first thirty pages in Jay McInerney's novel Bright Lights, Big City are intense. It's six in the morning, the main character is wandering high on coke through a club and his only friend is no where in sight. When he finally leaves disorientated and without enough cab fare to get home, he is hit with the crippling morning sunlight and the painful realization that he left his shades at home. Picture a comic reel where a man stumbles towards the light at the end of a dark tunnel dodging bald women, men in drag and tiny Bolivian soldiers and you will get a sense of how this story begins. The writing style grabbed me from the first page. The novel is written in the second person so as the reader you are the main character, "all messed up with no place to go" (10) reacting to life with a smart mouth.
I love the prose in this novel, especially in the sense that I find the main character's disheartened quips entertaining. My favorite passage so far is, "GRANNY CRUSHED BY NUT WHILE WIMPS WATCH" (13) where the main character furiously debates whether or not to help an old woman in distress. It intrigued me to realize that most of the scenes I was chuckling at were painfully unfunny. He laughs about his blow problem, the feelings he still has for his estranged wife and the job he hates; this seems like foreshadowing to me. I sympathize with the main character because I get the feeling that all the terrible things he jokes about will eventually happen and then life will hit him harder than he can imagine. I like that and I look forward to observing how he recovers, if he does at all. Either way, I'm hooked.
Rating: 
Summary: Superficial and tired
Review: This novel reads much like an entertaining article in a magazine; it's light, with little insight into the human condition or, more specifically, into the psyches of the central characters. The word surface has a gloss, which is pleasant enough, but which falls far short of sustaining repeated readings. It is disposable literature, masquerading as something more permanent.
*
The protagonist identifies himself swiftly as enjoying an elite, Ivy League, background, with an accompanying modest cushion of wealth. His talents and, more desperately, his potential are hailed as grand and admirable. His interest in literature, in particular, is implicitly cited as rescuing and validating his moral worth. All this is somewhat tiresome and self-satisfied, and does recall the basic scenario of Catcher in the Rye (for better or for worse). Unlike in that alleged classic, here the author feels obliged to explain the protagonist's lack of direction, and he does so clumsily, resorting to a poorly realised appeal to grief.
*
The minor characters fair still less well. Amanda, the prodigal model cum wife, is empty and vacuous - no attempt is made into fathoming how or why this might be so. Similarly, Tad, an accomplice in drugs and clubbing, is rendered flatly. The surface might well be amusing, or even alluring, but in a novel one could expect more than what could be provided in the space of a thirty second television commercial (and that's all that's offered).
*
The eighties in New York might have been interesting in some sense, but the source of that interest remains opaque after reading this ultimately rather dull book.
Rating:
Summary: Underrated Classic!
Review: "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
Rating:
Summary: Pulse of a generation
Review: There was a certain pulse of the 80's, just as there was of the 50's and 60's. This is the post hippie generation coming of age! And as with every generation, values and mores are part of the culture. This story tells of the trails and tribulations of an individual faced with tragedy, the difficulty in dealing with it, and the self questioning it imposes after it is discovered there is no where to run and hide. Like many stories before it, the self-discovery provides a ray of light, and a day of hope! A good quick read told by McInerney that captures both the pulse of its time, and age old internal strife.
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