Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
A Book Review
This is one of the best books I have ever read about being young, being out on the town and getting a little bit messy in the process. Never before has a writer so evocatively captured ‘that imperceptibly pivot where two A.M. changes to six A.M’ when you suddenly find yourself, alone, blinking in the cold light of day with no money in your wallet with a long walk home.
Do not be mistaken, Bright Lights, Big City is not just a paean to ‘Bolivian marching powder’ and the joy of decadence. Alongside this exuberance is gentle parody of that most august of high-brow journals, the New Yorker magazine. With the main character there is that eternal satire of the literary young man determined to make his way in the world of letters. But as this is McInerney that way is littered with difficulty and his progress is somewhat haphazard.
It is a hugely funny novel, focusing on the exploits of ‘You’, the unnamed narrator as his life gradually slips out of control over a week of drink and drug fuelled debauchery. By writing in the second person singular, McInerney sidesteps that first novelist’s default ‘I’ setting, allowing the author to give some objectivity to this thinly-veiled autobiography. By addressing the main character as ‘you’ — ‘You are not the type of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning’ — it distances the author while pulling the reader into the text. This central stylistic approach is what gives the novel such humor as you are forced to imagine yourself faced with the same series of hilarious situations that occur throughout the novel.
While there is great humor and a wonderful satirical element to the book, this outer frivolity encases a kernel of emotion that blind-sides you when it appears as if out of nowhere. It is a difficult balancing act mixing comedy and pathos without either overwhelming the other. The comedy isn’t too light and the emotion isn’t too mawkish they fit perfectly together.
If I had a time machine I would go to 80s New York, if I could go drinking with anyone, it would be with McInerney’s narrator. Neither of which is possible, so I recommend you to read this book instead.
