A lot of books got a lot of hype in the 80s for supposedly describing the shallowness of that decade. This is one book that in my opinion, deserved and still deserves the hype. The nice thing about this novel is that it doesn't try to do too much or jam too much into its pages. Furthermore, although the hero of the book is basically a nice Midwestern boy who takes a good job in publishing in NYC and quickly gets in over his head, the book doesn't succumb to all those "yuppies on the wild side" cliches. Sure, the narrator runs into a few weird characters, such as the bald girl with the tattooed head in the first chapter, but these are minor encounters, the type you'd expect. He doesn't go off on some crazy "Desperately Seeking Susan" wild ride of the type that launched a thousand plots in the 80s, each of them less believable and less funny than the last.
It would have been so easy to go that way too, because our hero has a coke habit and money problems and appears in some danger of ending up on the wrong side of a dealer or three, but the book stays realistic. Our hero gets up, throws away the dunning letters from Brooks Brothers, and goes to make an attempt at keeping his job before getting dragged out again by his party-hearty buddy Tad Allagash. He occasionally grieves for his dead mother or his lost wife (who has run off to pursue a career of her own in modeling) before drowning his sorrows in the next round of booze and coke. At the end, he finally realizes that he will have to learn to live all over again and get over his loss, and that life unmedicated can still be sweet despite its pain. This is truly a story that could happen to anyone, or at the very least, to anyone's friend.
I also liked that the narrator and his wife did not appear to come from very wealthy backgrounds and therefore were a lot more relatable than the characters in Bret Easton Ellis's books. The narrator and his wife are wide-eyed kids when they come to the city, and it's easy to see how they get led astray by its delights. Nor does the book sink into the overly literary mode of, say, Michael Chabon. Mcinerney's prose is airy and descriptive and yes, similar to F. Scott Fitzgerald updated to a more modern age. It captures a lot of great details in a minimum of sentences.
I was charmed by this book even though I never had a coke habit or a fast-paced job in NYC. It's a nicely crafted little remembrance of an era that's past...or is it? I bet a lot of the same stuff is going on in NYC today among the young people who move there and get exposed to the "bright lights, big city" for the first time. Five stars. I just wish McInerney's other books had been this good.
Download Ebook Bright Lights, Big City By Jay McInerney