By: Jay Mcinerney Publisher: Vintage Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Vintage Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 208 Publication Date: August 12, 1984 Release Date: August 12, 1984
Product Description: The tragicomedy of a young man in NYC, struggling with the reality of his mother's death, alienation and the seductive pull of drugs.
Excellent Service I ordered this book and received it very quickly. The book came in new condition as described. Thanks!
An Excellent Example of the MFA Art The book is well written, written perhaps as an exercise in writing in the second person. As a story though it is thoroughly predictable and utterly dishonest. McInerney tapped into a particularly scene, probably researched in the pages of New York Magazine and The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" pieces. It was embraced at a time when the publishing industry was desperate for new voices that would appeal to young readers, reared on the superficiality of TV after-school specials. Why I don't think this book will have lasting appeal is that its observations are actually reflection, heard second hand or experienced vicariously. (Reports to the contrary, the book was not a contemporary, urban, "On the Road." The writer was always and remains a poseur. Which is to say though seductive on the surface--the reader is led to believe he or she is given a privileged peek into the hip New York of the early 80s--the book is notable for its lack of authenticity. "Bright Lights, Big City" made McInerney a literary star although he never produced another book actually worth reading. Read the book for its style and the New York "touch points," but otherwise it is a waste of time.
Stunning... Writing in the second person can be draining - the constant balance between the character and the reader and having to maintain both the distance and the familiarity is something few writers tackle other than in short stories (Junot Diaz is the perfect example). But Bright Lights, Big City manages to produce the first "great" second person narrative that I can think of. From the very first pages where McInerney throws us into New York night life, we are confronted with a character who is both strange and familiar who is moving in a New York that is both strange and familiar. As a fact checker at a major publication who is getting over the fact his wife, who happens to be a model, has left him, the protagonist struggles with a dual desire to be isolated and comforted by others.
What is most striking about this book is the prose. It is both clean and smooth and has a way of moving you back and forth between action and description. This book can be read in a single night and you find yourself so attached to this guy who is as messed up as can be, yet you feel so sorry for him as he confronts his brother, uses more drugs than you can imagine, and struggles to write a novel. He is the anti-hero spawned in a world after the Beats made names for themselves, and I can honestly day that this novel may be a stronger piece of fiction than On the Road or even Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me.
This is a gem and should be treated as such.
Much before the loss of the innocence Jay McInerney's funny and smart debut "Bright Lights, Big City" was published about 25 years ago. The current Vintage Contemporary edition features in its cover a drawing of a men entering the Odeon and the Twin Towers in the background - as if we all needed to remember this was a book written much before the loss of the innocence.
The set is New York in the middle 1980s, when AIDS wasn't the issue and the city fuelled with cocaine and neon. That decade always seem to be something lost in time. And literature and cinema handles it this way. "Bight Lights, Big City" is sort of a lighter and smarter cousin of "American Psycho", which handles the same generation. But McInerney's prose is much well handed and his narrative more effective than Breat Easton Ellis'. The novel is entirely written in the second person, and it feels like `you' is just one more character.
Rarely did a writer capture the 1980s zeitgeist as McInerney. We see his nameless protagonist frantically crossing the city after drugs, women or something he lost in his life and doesn't know. The plot unfolds in a New York minute. The writer has the ear for capturing vivid and believable dialogues, while creating interesting characters.
However fun it is to read "Bright Lights, Big City", it is impossible not to notice that it is above all a sad story. The main character is only going through the motions, just the course life takes. He never takes the plunge to change his destiny. Could he if he tried? Maybe so. We'll never know. But what we do know is that McInerney has written a novel that will last for ages. When people in the future wonders how the 1980s was like
Holden Caulfield Meets the Ginger Man This is a pretty good first novel and is intriguing insofar as it shows the themes which engage McInerney's later works. This reads a bit like Holden Caulfield getting his first job in the big city. And it also reminds me of JP Donleavy's extraordinary novel, The Ginger Man. One can see hints of Fitzgerald and almost make the case that McInerneys novels simply keep re-telling Gatsby. Such, at least, seems to be the case after reading The Good Life and Brightness Falls, the latter of which is an American masterpiece. There is something universal about this bright, young man taking his bright ideals into the crucible of New York where they are pummelled after much heartbreak into reality. The public perception rarely seems to match the private persona, either in you or in others. Despite the heaps of artifice which you pile upon upon yourself to keep the dogs at bay, it's all still self-deception and it never fails to disappoint. I wish we had seen more of Tad Allagash, the Falstaff figure whom Dunleavy uses so brilliantly to bring out the comedy of his protagonists in so many of his novels. I enjoyed the second-person narrative voice and it was bold to start a literary career by depolying such a technique. I really think that if you want to get the best of Jay McInerney, you need to read Brightness Falls. But this accessible, brief, first novel will lead you ineluctably to the real brilliance that awaits you in Brightness Falls.
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