Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney

Before I left Boston, my former boss John tried to "scare" me about New York publishing by invoking Bright Lights, Big City. And when I did leave, his going-away present was a copy of the book--though at that point I think it was less of a cautionary tale than an in-joke and a field guide for what not to do in the fast city. Unfortunately for John, I took less from the book about life lessons and more about where to score the good cocaine.

Luckily for all of us, this information is outdated by about twenty years.

In all seriousness, I really enjoyed the book. It's Jay McInerney's first novel, and very much a product of its time (1985). It has some of the interesting grit of New York during that period, without the utter cheesiness that we've all come to associate with the mid-80s (like the retroactive application of Duran Duran to everything in sitcom flashbacks and lame movies). Instead, there's an authenticity to the go-go 80s Reaganauts here: the glitz looks awful in daylight after the coke runs out, and the protagonist knows it.

In fact, most of the book takes place in this harsher light. The unnamed main dude (or "narrator," I guess, although the book is in the second person) spends the majority of the book's two weeks in search of Bolivian marching powder, sex, or his ex-wife--and none of them are easy to come by. He has a job at a literary magazine as a factchecker (it sounds suspiciously like the New Yorker), and a halfhearted desire to do something "better." His rising-model wife has recently left him, and he can't figure out whether he's upset that she's gone, or just disgruntled that she had the audacity to leave him, when he condescended to marry her in the first place despite her white-trash ways. Everything around him is flashy, but he's lost the enthusiasm to sustain it all.

Later, it becomes clearer that his everyday life is an elaborate social construct to distract him from a crumbling inner life. The trendy horndog best friend, the unfinished novel, the obsession over the departed Amanda....these make him seem amusingly sympathetic at first, then increasingly asshole-ish. Right about the time he reaches the point where he (and the reader) knows that he can't be any more self-destructive, he starts revealing the real reasons for the overpriced, escapist life. One of the neatest things McInerney does is balance the climax between the self-serving justification that the hero has used all along and the genuine emotional pull of quiet tragedy.

The pacing and tone of the book are just right for the story: brief, caustic, and funny. No single anecdote is longer than a few pages, echoing the speedy thread of white powder that snakes through the narrative. Yet there's no disjointedness either; each episode is a clear step in the evolution (or devolution, I'm still not sure which) of the character. The whole is an excellent snapshot of a guy at a weird personal point and even weirder cultural time.

Some passages I really liked:

"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 and decide to check out an exhibition--costumes of the Hapsburg Court at the Met, say, or the Japanese lacquerware of the Muromachi period at the Asia Society. The kind of guy who calls up the woman he met at a publishing party Friday night, the party he did not get sloppy drunk at. See if she wants to check out the exhibition and maybe do an early dinner. A guy who would wait until 11 a.m. to call her, because she might not be an early riser, like he is. She may have been out late, perhaps at a nightclub. And maybe a couple of sets of tennis before the museum. He wonders if she plays, but of course she would. When you meet the girl who wouldn't et cetera you will tell her that you are slumming, visiting your own 6 a.m. Lower East Side of the soul on a lark, stepping nimbly between the piles of garbage to the gay marimba rhythms in your head. Well, no, not gay. But she will know exactly what you mean."

"'Things change, people change,' is what Amanda said. For her that covered it. You wanted an explanation, an ending that would assign blame and dish up justice. You considered violence and you considered reconciliation. But what you are left with is a premonition of the way your life will fade behind you, like a book you have read too quickly, leaving a dwindling trail of images and emotions, until all you can remember is a name."