Along with Tama Janowitz’s Slaves of New York and Bret Easton Ellis’s Less than Zero, Jay McInerney’s first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, explores and details the frenetic club life and drug scene of mid-1980s New York. Bright Lights, Big City follows the actions of an unnamed young man addressed only as “you” by the narrator, as in the opening lines of the novel: “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.”
Whether the effect is taken as an address to the reader understood as the unnamed “you” or if it is a conversational use of self-reflexivity, the novel inaugurated a short-lived vogue of second-person present-tense narration, especially in fiction of the New Yorker.
The main character of the novel is a 24-year-old frustrated writer who works as a fact checker for a culturally esteemed New York literary magazine. Coping with both the death of his mother and his recent divorce from a successful model who, like the narrator, is originally from the Midwest, the main character succumbs to the club life and cocaine scene. The constant nightlife begins to take a toll on his work, but he is spurred on by his friend, an up-and-coming ad executive, Tad Allagash. The novel follows the main character’s descent and final rebirth and is paralleled by the running image of a “coma baby” story seen in the New York Post headlines. The denouement of the story involves the main character’s acceptance of his mother’s death and realization that he must take charge of his life, instead of being run by friends such as Allagash or by drugs. The novel concludes as the main character, after another night spent in the clubs, trades his symbolic Ray-Ban sunglasses—which protect him from the light of day—for a loaf of fresh bread, which he realizes he will have to relearn to eat.
Often compared to J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Bright Lights, Big City revels in cynical, deadpan humor and references to popular culture. The novel has been seen as a celebration of the club and drug scene and as a roman à clef to New York in the 1980s. McInerney, however, has argued that the novel is “a modest critique of an age in which an actor is the President, in which fashion models are asked for their opinions, in which getting into a nightclub is seen as a significant human achievement.”
One of the first and the most successful of Vintage Contemporaries paperback novels, Bright Lights, Big City poses questions of artistic legitimacy, symbolized by the difference between the high-culture magazine the narrator works for and the mass-cultural Post that he surreptitiously reads.
SOURCES
Edwards, Thomas R. “Babylon Re-Revisited.” New York Review of Books (May 23, 1996): 28–29.
Faye, Jefferson. “Cultural/Familial Estrangement: Self-Exile and Self-Destruction in Jay McInerney’s Novels.” In The Literature of Emigration and Exile, edited by James Whitlark and Wendell Aycock, 115–130. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1992.
Girard, Stephanie. “‘Standing at the Corner of Walk and Don’t Walk’: Vintage Contemporaries, Bright Lights, Big City, and the Problems of Betweenness.” American Literature 68 (1996): 161–185.
McInerney, Jay. Bright Lights, Big City. New York: Vintage, 1984.
Noe, Marcia. “(Mis)reading the Region: Midwestern Innocence in the Fiction of Jay McInerney.” Midamerica: The Yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature 25 (1998): 162–174.