"Bright Lights, Big City" by Jay McInerney
Paperback, 182 pages
Published 1984 by Vintage
ISBN-10 : 0394726413 | ISBN-13 | 978-0394726410
Date Finished: Jun 19, 2021
How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
Find it at BookShop.org or Amazon
In my reading travels, I stumbled across a reference to the enormous popularity of the book “Bright Lights, Big City” when it was published in the mid-80s, so I went and picked it up. It’s a frenetic and fast paced look at a drug addict with a literary job in New York City in an era when everyone, it seemed, was doing cocaine. It was a fun reprieve from some of the other heavy books I’ve been reading and a great reminder to read more fiction.
My Notes:
Tad's mission in life is to have more fun than anyone else in New York City, and this involves a lot of moving around, since there is always the likelihood that where you aren't is more fun than where you are.
You want to be like that. You also think he is shallow and dangerous. His friends are all rich and spoiled, like the cousin from Memphis you met earlier in the evening who would not accompany you below Fourteenth Street because, he said, he didn't have a lowlife visa.
Your presence here is only a matter of conducting an experiment in limits, reminding yourself of what you aren't. You see yourself as the kind of guy who wakes up early on Sunday morning and steps out to cop the Times and croissants. Who might take a cue from the Arts and Leisure section ad decide to check out an exhibition—...
What you need is a good pep talk from Tad Allagash, but he is not to be found. You try to imagine what he would say. Back on the horse. How we're really going to have some fun. Something like that. You suddenly realize that he has already slipped out with some rich Hose Queen.
But there she is in her pegged pants, a kind of doo-wop Retro ponytail pulled off to the side, as eligible a candidate as you are likely to find this late in the game. The sexual equivalent of fast food.
If an error slips into the magazine, it is one of you, and not the writer, who will be crucified. Not fired, but scolded, perhaps even demoted to the messenger room or the typing pool. [fact-checkers at the magazine]
"Is she pissed," you ask.
"I wouldn't put it that way," Wade says, "I like that word better the way the British use it—colloquial for intoxicated: e.g., Malcolms Lowry's consul getting pissed on mescal in Quauhnahuac, if I remember the name of the town correctly.
"Still got that nasty sinus problem, I see." Wade gives you a knowing look. Though he prides himself on being hip, he is too fastidious to do anything dangerous or dirty. You suspect that his sexual orientation is largely theoretical. He'd take a hot piece of gossip over a warm piece of ass any day of the week.
The writer, a former restaurant critic, lavishes all his care on adjectives and disdains nouns. He describes an aging cabinet minister as "nubbly" and a rising socialist as "lightly browned." You believe that Clingfast gave you this piece in order to see you hang yourself.
The people in the Verification Department tend to look down on fiction, in which words masquerade as flesh without the backbone of fact. There is a general sense that if fiction isn't dead, it is at least beside the point.
All the magazine fiction passes through the department, since no one else wants it you take it upon yourself to do the routine checking—make sure that if a story set in San Francisco contains a psycho named Phil Doaks, there is no Phil Doaks in the San Francisco phone book who might turn around and sue.
If you were Japanese, this would be the time to commit seppuku. Pen a farewell poem about the transience of cherry blossoms and the fleet transit of youth, wrap the sword blade in white silk, plunge it home and pull upward, rightward through your intestines. And no whimpering or sour expressions, please. You learned all about the ritual while checking an article on Japan. But you lack the samurai resolution. You are the kind of guy who always hopes for a miracle at the last minute.
Nothing seems to be what you want to do until you consider writing. Suffering is supposed to be the raw stuff of art. You could write a book. You feel that if only you could make yourself sit down at a typewriter you could give shape to ...
Along the bar are faces familiar under artificial light, belonging to people whose daytime existence is only a tag—designer, writer, artist.
She asks you about writers and artists on the staff. You dish up a standard portion of slander and libel that would never pass the Clinger's requirements of verification.
Once upon a time, you assumed you were very likable. That you had an attractive wife and a fairly interesting job seemed only your due. You were a good guy. You deserved some of the world's booty. After you met Amanda and came to New York, you began to feel that you were no longer on the outside looking in.
Tad comes back, pleased with himself. "Bingo," he says.
It's somewhere past midnight. Anything that starts now is not going to end at a reasonable hour. You think about slipping out and heading home.
She introduced her mother as Dolly. The feed-and-grain salesman, you surmised, was no longer in the picture. There was tremendous tension in the cramped living room. Dolly chain-smoked Kools, flirted with you, and tossed offhand jabs at Amanda.
You both despised people who thought an invitation to X's birthday bash anyway, with your tongues in your cheeks, and while Amanda circulated you snorted some of X's very good friend's private stash of pink Peruvian flake in the upstairs lounge.
You have been inclined of late to underestimate the goodness of the race.
“She can’t hurt you. Nothing can hurt the samurai who enters combat fully resolved to die.”
"Not so dark that she couldn't see you were her ticket out of Trailer Park Land. Bright lights, big city. If you really wanted to do the happy couple thing you shouldn't have let her model. A week on Seventh Avenue would warp a nun.
You know for a fact, or at least you have it on good authority from Amanda, who once did location work with her, that she is a martyr to the search for the perfect nose.
Amanda is, or was, a perfect eight: hips thirty -four, waist twenty-three, bust thirty-three. You also know her shoe, glove and ring size. Clara would be proud. You have all the numbers.
"Omniscience must be a terrible burden, Michael. How do you bear it?"
"You know what I mean. I should know these things. I don't have much time and there's so much I've always wondered about. I was brought up to think sex was an ordeal that married women had to endure. It took me a long time to get over that idea. I feel sort of cheated."