Bright Lights, Big City

Rating:
Summary: '80s excess done right
Review: Here's the bad: The below-average movie overshadows the book, and the '80s themes are aging quickly. Here's the good: McInerney's gimmicky use of the second-person throughout the book works for the most part, and the story and characters are interesting and engaging. Tales of the excesses of Manhattan nightlife have been done to death, but McInerney's version is good -- was once a fresh voice in the crowd -- and is still an entertaining read.

Rating:
Summary: A Yuppie's Cry for Help
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: one of the few significant social fictions of the 80s
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: Very Clever - Unique style
Review: Another book that you will find it very hard to put down (Something that does no happen to me very often) - A real page turner. A young man goes envelopes himself in the big city 80's fast lane to escape from ....

I have never read a book written in this way - Until I read this book I thought books could either be 1st/2nd/3rd Person could some write to me and tell me what Person is this book written in and if they have ever come across another book written this way.

Rating:
Summary: Overrated, mediocre.
Review: Well, contrary to the stereotype, here's a pretty anti-Bright Lights review from a New Yorker. I found the book a mildly amusing, but very shallowly rendered, portrait of a very specific time, place, profession, and lifestyle. McInerey seems undecided about exactly what he is undertaking. At times the book is straight satire, at times real tragedy. And the genres blend like oil and water in BLBC, each undermining the other and leaving the book without foundation. Admittedly, there are very moving passages (very late in the book), where McInerey seems to have decided which direction he'd like to take, but by then the damage is done. His use of the second-person makes the story feel partially formed. While he doesn't use the POV poorly, it is inherently flawed in that the reader is invited to bring more of him or herself into the novel, only to find a clash with the story told. Because of this it feels more a novelty device than a means of rendering the protagonist an everyman.

The final flaw of the book is the target of its criticism. One review claimed that the book was dead on satire of "the MBA set" (or something to this effect), missing the point entirely that it is not the MBA set being satirized. Rather, there are a hodge-podge of targets: Ivy League literati, ad men, models, designers, Rastas, Hasidim, Greek diner owners and Greek gigolos--all told about half of New York. Thus McInerey's barbs seem thrown wild as buckshot at a skeetshoot and come across as one-liners about 1980s stereotypes. For a much better, and better focused, work of 80s satire, see Ellis's American Psycho (which -is- aimed at the MBA set and which uses deliberate, stylized, shallow representation).

Not a timeless book.

Frankly, I'm a little surprised it outlived its decade of origin.

Rating:
Summary: Competent Writing, an Amusing Slice of the 80's
Review: Short book that goes by quickly.

Well-crafted but curiously hollow story of a yuppie trying to make it in New York's tough publishing world. Characters ring true, but few were sympathetic.

I liked it well enough, at about the same intellectual level that I enjoy reading Vanity Fair magazine. So if you are looking for an entertaining read that will not make you worry about important issues, I would say, "go ahead and read it."

Rating:
Summary: Not Just an 80's Relic
Review: I am aware McInerney has kind of gone out of fashion (so '80's, don't you know) but this book remains funny, wise, and endearingly satirical about the eternal vices. And that's what's supposed to last, isn't it? This first novel relies heavily for its tone on good old F. Scott Fitzgerald, but the second-person narration is a brilliant story-telling strategy--it sucks "you" right in to the narrator's world. (For another great novel that uses "you" a lot, see Robert O'Connor's chilling "Buffalo Soldiers.")

Rating:
Summary: Light reading. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Review: How did this book become so popular? How is it that all the reviewers either love it or hate it? There's nothing to it.

First warning that you are reading a useless book - someone compares it to THe Catcher in the Rye. Immediately you know that it is going to be filled with disconnected scenes and a narrator with mental problems who reports on it all. However, none of these Catcher in the Rye ripoffs have a narrator as entertaining as Holden Caulfield.

The main character in this book is a self-obsessed Yuppie who snorts coke, screws up in his job and eventually finds a little bit of peace. The second person narration works in defining just how self-obsessed this guy is in that all he's doing is talking to himself about himself. After 100 pages you wonder why he's so enamored.

Anyhow, it's a short book. It reads quickly. A week at most if you are a slow reader will this book take to read. You'll read it. You'll forget about it. But it is ideal to read if you just finished a Dostoyevski book and you don't think you're ready to tackle anything too deep right away.

Rating:
Summary: A book for the New Yorker
Review: Bright Lights, Big City is a great book. You can identify with the character specially of you live in New York and if you are familiar with its nightife and its elements. The main character goes through highs and lows with his cocaine addiction, his job as a "Fact verifier" and his wild friends. If you like Glamorama you will love this book

Rating:
Summary: great
Review: I remember hearing about this book when it first came out but I only bought and read it just recently. I was really impressed with the quality of the writing. This is just one of those gems that you enjoy from cover to cover.Fast paced, powerful stuff.Kind of like Ellis' American Psycho' or Asher Brauner's Love songs of the tone deaf'.This is a very good book.