Bright Lights, Big City – Jay McInerney
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Blurb: ‘You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might become clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. The again, maybe not…So begins our nameless hero’s trawl through the brightly lit streets of Manhattan, sampling all this wonderland has to offer yet suspecting that tomorrow’s hangover may be caused by more than simply excess.
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‘Probably the best book ever written about being young, about doing drugs and about music’ says the Daily Express, a quote Bloomsbury have gladly plastered across the front cover. After turning the last page of Jay McInererney’s 1981 novel, I let out a groan.
The Daily Express have only served to point out that everything ‘cult’ about this novel is only a horrible cliche of itself. A lot of the novel- the drug-addicted, semi-alcoholic wannabe writer living in New York- sounds like a poor rewrite of Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary. I must admit, there is a certain allure about a New York novel, and at points Bright Lights reads like Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems put into prose. And, the novel does touch on themes that complicate The Daily Express’s erudite conclusion, but it certainly doesn’t carve a name for itself in the history of cult literature, let alone rank it among ‘the best’.
The novel begins with a muddled exchange between the main character, name unknown, high on a ‘comet trail of white powder’, and a bald girl. The protagonist remains forever illusive through the clever use of the pronoun ‘you’, which places you, as a character, at the centre of the novel -this a tool underused and underrated, I think, in literature; when used right, it’s mystery is compelling. The pronoun’s effect here, however, soon becomes redundant, through its excessive use. Not as cleverly and sparingly used, then, as Ian Banks’s Complicity, which uses the pronoun to hide the novel’s sadistic murder whilst simultaneously forcing the reader to commit horrendous and gruesome crimes.
A large portion of the novel centres around similar scenes, more drugs, more alcohol, more hopeless conversations with strangers. The breakdown of the character’s marriage with model wife Amanda makes up the novel’s crux, a storyline that intermittently weaves itself inside the plot, despite the story being set some time in the future. The wife is pretty one-dimensional; she’s beautiful, but she’s heartless and cold and a slut anyway. You see, this guy is the victim of her selfish ways, and feels begrudged that he is denied the heterosexual alpha male ‘protector’ role, also denied to him by his female villain of a boss. I say heterosexual because the novel does verge on the homophobic at times (“‘move to the rear, Quennie,’ the bus driver says, ‘I know you know how to do that'”). The homosexual man lives within this creepy, camp underworld, always the clown. To me, this just feels like a cheap attempt at humour, but each to their own.
Anyway, Amanda isn’t really who we should be focusing on. The novel soon makes it clear that the character’s psychology runs far deeper; an Oedipus Complex centred around his relationship with his mother is interesting. At one point, the protagonist feeds his mother morphine to keep her pain at bay, a sort of reversal of the mother/child breast-feeding ritual. Another beautiful image comes in the form of mannequins, when Amanda’s image appears in a show window, and her husband struggles to decipher her true identity and his own emotional compass.
Often, the novel is witty and funny, when Jay McInerney’s brilliant and more authentic writing voice emerges. These flashes of brilliance continually fail to be sustained throughout the novel, however, making other scenes appear lazy and artificial.
But is it cult?
Certain ‘cult’ virtues give the book it’s modest prestige; this is an exploration into indulgence, ambition, gender, escapism and, dare I say, love. For a book where very little actually happens, it’s rich images combined with a daring bluntness (very Hemingway-esque) makes the novel, a risqué feat in itself. Battling with such daunting topics under 200 pages is what makes the novel cult, for me anyways, and whilst I would recommend the book to another, I would advise a critical and, at times, a forgiving eye.
14/20
Slurring Words 