‘Bright Lights, Big City’ by Jay McInerney

I first read Bright Lights, Big City about two and a half years ago, when I began reading again in earnest. After eating my way through all of Bret Easton Ellis’s published works, starting with Less Than Zero and ending two months later with The Informers, I moved on, hungry for more, to the work of one of his supposed contemporaries - Jay McInerney. In doing so I developed an equally intense love for McInerney’s books, reading a clutch of his novels and short story collections in swift succession. (It was also a treat to see him in Gossip Girl from time to time, portraying an exaggerated version of himself named Jeremiah Harris whose hobbies included getting very drunk and bossing poor old Dan Humphrey around.) Cameos in now-defunct TV shows aside, Jay McInerney is a writer known for his wit and powers of perception, and it was back in 1984 that Bright Lights, Big City started it all.

One of the most striking things about Bright Lights, Big City, something I singularly failed to notice the first time round, is its expert use of the second person. The second person is seldom used in full-length fiction, being as it is a very difficult style to pull off, however Jay McInerney is one of its most skilled and successful practitioners. By passing up the more common first and third person forms in favour of the far trickier second person, McInerney creates an oddly documentary-like atmosphere. We are not just looking at words printed on paper but are being included in our hero’s day-to-day life. Imagine The Truman Show, only cooler. In Bright Lights, Big City the protagonist remains nameless throughout, though we do learn that he is twenty-four years old and working as a fact checker at a reputable New York magazine. Having recently been ditched by his supermodel wife, however, he is at something of a loose end, and so he spends what free time he has doing cocaine with his well-to-do but lascivious friend Tad Allagash (think of Gossip Girl’s Chuck Bass, but with more syllables). Our unnamed hero’s misery is compounded when he is fired from his fact checking job, and this setback only serves to reignite a repressed grief; we discover that, in addition to his wife leaving him, he has recently lost his mother to cancer.

There is a quote on the front cover of this edition, attributed to British novelist Tony Parsons, which describes Bright Lights, Big City as ‘probably the best book ever written about being young, about doing drugs, and about music.' And while Parsons is absolutely right on all counts, the book is also much more than this. At just 175 pages it is rather a short novel, at least by Dickensian or Trollopian standards, but in less than two hundred pages it packs in a huge amount of sentiment. Bright Lights, Big City begins, as Parsons states, as a tale of twenty-somethings in Manhattan doing coke and partying, however as the ending draws near McInerney reveals in his characters a surprising emotional depth. I will finish off with a passage that resonated deeply with me, but please bear in mind that most of Bright Lights, Big City is more cheerful than this:

'Before it happened you couldn’t believe you would survive your mother’s death. Torn between thinking it was your duty to throw yourself on her pyre and her wish that you should not waste time mourning, you knew no reaction that satisfied both conditions. You spent so much time in anticipation that when her death came you didn’t know what you felt. After the funeral it seemed as if you were wandering around your own interior looking for signs of life, finding nothing but empty rooms and white walls. You kept waiting for the onset of grief. You are beginning to suspect it arrived nine months later, disguised as your response to Amanda’s departure.’

This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in January 2013.