Bright Lights, Big City
Back to the future with Jay McInerney’s startling debut
The deceptively simple plot of Bright Lights, Big City goes something like this: it’s six a.m. and you’re at another party – again. You’re still waiting to meet the girl of your dreams or, at least, waiting to forget the girl you once dreamed about. But your supply of drugs is running low and worse, you have no money for a taxi, and worse still, you have no idea how you are going to write about all of this when you get home.
At first glance, Bright Lights, Big City is a story about an aspiring young writer attending a lot of Manhattan coke parties, penned by a young writer who attended a lot of Manhattan coke parties. This is also a novel about a man who works as a fact checker for an anonymous New York magazine, written by a man who worked at the New Yorker as – yes, that’s right – a fact checker. Given this information, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes – or even Inspector Plod – to guess where McInerney’s inspiration derives from.
Although the idea of living a role for a while in order to get the part right has been more or less accepted by the thespian community, the unremittingly popular realm of autobiographical fiction remains a somewhat bitter pill for the literary establishment to swallow, the literary equivalent of reality TV. However, Bright Lights, Big City is much more than a sordid, kiss-and-tell autobiography. In fact, unlike most ‘confessional’ novels, it isn’t even written in the first person.
Like an old choose your own adventure novel, ‘you’ are the protagonist of this story. From first page to last, the second-person narrator sucks you directly into the downward spiral of Manhattan night life, taking you on a whirlwind tour of the after-hours parties and the ‘comet trails of white powder’ that go with this territory. But it soon becomes apparent that this narration is much more than a device to mitigate the tedious act of trawling through the diarized ramblings of a dishevelled coke fiend. Although McInerney’s sparkling prose would probably make even the dullest cocaine monologue seem interesting, the carefully controlled authorial hand which pushes the exhausted narrator ever onward allows him to gradually reveal slivers of information to reader and narrator alike, and both are soon learning to live life anew. McInerney has been there, done that, and he has something to say about it.
Far from omniscient, the clueless narrator staggers from party to party, ‘all messed up and nowhere to go’. He doesn’t see himself as ‘the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning,’ but here he is anyway and here you are, the reader, right there with him. The instant rapport that’s built between narrator and reader jars horribly with the sense of urban alienation that surrounds the story, and though the city itself is often presented with a sympathetic vibrancy, it quickly becomes apparent that the narrator wants to personify himself as ‘you’ so he can distance himself from the realities of his own rapidly disintegrating existence. His job hangs by a thread. His supermodel wife has left him without even saying goodbye. His best friend is a nihilistic, coke-snorting ad-exec who pesters him on the telephone night and day. Wouldn’t you want to be someone else?
A wonderfully observed novel, full of eminently quotable one-liners and tragicomic set-pieces, Bright Lights, Big City truly deserves the oft-bandied expression of being a ‘zeitgeist defining’ novel. It’s at least as emblematic of the 1980s as chunky mobile phones or Gordon Gekko. But more than this, it has matured into a brilliantly defined snapshot of what it is like to be young and single and male, feeling as if you have nothing left to lose. Though fashions may have changed, this story is as true today as it was twenty years ago, and it will most likely still be true in twenty years time. If you can get past the 80’s hip-speak, these timeless qualities make it as much of a rite-of-passage novel as The Catcher in the Rye or On The Road, an instant antidote to the loneliness and isolation that living in a big city seems to create. Although the novel runs the risk of alienating some – women may be put off by the ‘lads’ night out’ feel of some chapters, while guardians of public morals will doubtless be outraged at its gung-ho attitude towards sex and drugs, for everybody else, this is a sheer contact high, a novel bursting both with kinetic energy and a youthful rebel yell at the same time.
The bright lights of the city at night seem seductive at first, but by the end of the novel, you realise that the party’s over. It’s six a.m. and the bright light is the morning sun as it begins to shine through the cracks in the curtains. When the party ends, the question that Jay McInerney is ultimately asking us is not ‘do you know where you are?’
He is asking us if we know who we are.