Product Description

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. Then again, it might 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 simple excess. "Bright Lights, Big City" is an acclaimed classic which marked Jay McInerney as one of the major writers of our time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13072 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Review
'Probably the best book ever written about being young, about doing drugs and about music' Tony Parsons, Daily Express 'A rambunctious, deadly funny novel that goes for the right mark - the human heart' Raymond Carver 'McInerney earns his place in literary history with Bright Lights, Big City, the comic morality tale of a spoilt young man making a mess of his life in Manhattan ... a landmark evocation of the wasteful decade it lampoons' Guardian 'The seminal novel of the 1980s' New York Times

Raymond Carver
`A rambunctious, deadly funny novel that goes for the right mark -
the human heart'

Guardian
`McInerney earns his place in literary history with Bright Lights,
Big City, the comic morality tale'

Customer Reviews

Generation X and all that goes with it--great first novel
I read this literally the moment it came out decades ago. And now I've revisited it once more. This is not a large book but it packs a punch and is funny and gripping in its own way. My particular copy is the American version with a view of the World Trade Centers on the cover, in the background--talk about a book set in the past. But that's why I have so taken to it again; it is a time capsule of New York, the way McCrae's "Katzenjammer" is, or the way the book "The Devil Wear Prada" is. And those books have more in common with "Bright Lights" than just insane bosses and drug and social problems. Few novels will change the landscape of literature, but "Bright Lights" did, ushering in the way for the works of Palahniuk, Sedaris, McCrae, and Ellis. Even Burroughs ows something to Mr. McInerney. My only problem with this one book? It was too short and should have been a 400 page novel. It's rare you can say this about a book, but in this case, it's true.

80s Masterpiece
Easily McInerneys best novel (to date) and one of the best satires of 80s culture available. Plot follows our hero as he drinks and drugs around early 80s Manhattan until it all gets a bit too much. Very 80`s and slightly passe now but still if you laughed at American Psycho, understood Bonfire of the Vanities and enjoyed Oliver Stones "Wall Street" then this is pretty much in the same "greed is bad really" vein. Well worth reading. Up there with Martin Amis` "Money" in terms of heavy handed satirical humour with a message (man).

"You could have cut your losses, but you rode past that moment on a comet trail of white powder."
Tracing a few days in the life of a 24-year-old writer whose brain is frequently inhabited by "brigades of Bolivian soldiers...tired and muddy from their long march through the night," Jay McInerney takes the reader into the world of cocaine, club-hopping (at the "right" clubs), casual sex, avoidance of responsibility, and full-time self-indulgence in the early 1980s. With absurd humor, he satirizes the "high" life of New York City and the non-stop action and party scene of young professionals whose frantic activity keeps them from having to deal with the real world.

The unnamed main character becomes the reader as the author uses the second person point of view, telling the story as "you" go to work and clubs, and jaunt around the city. "You" work for a magazine at which no one has ever been fired, and where old, burnt-out columnists maunder in the hallways (a satire of The New Yorker, perhaps). "Your" immediate assignment is to translate and fact-check an article about the French elections by a deadline that "you" cannot possibly meet.

Gradually, "your" story unfolds. Your marriage to Amanda, a fashion model from the Midwest, has collapsed after less than a year--you are devastated by her desertion, and you have told no one of your divorce. Your article for the magazine is a disaster. You avoid dealing with these issues and the death of your mother (more than a year ago) by creating a new reality for yourself through cocaine. The turning point of the action comes with the arrival of your brother Michael, who summons you back home for your mother's memorial service and the scattering of her ashes.

It is difficult to write a novel that focuses on shallow people living shallow lives without having the novel be shallow, but McInerney's point of view forces the reader to identify with the main character, and his uncompromising vision of this empty life, which he presents with absurd humor, is entertaining. Similes and metaphors here are sometimes over-the-top. ("Her voice was like the New Jersey state anthem played through an electric shaver." Tad is "a figure skater who never considers the sharks under the ice.") But these provide some variety within McInerney's short, staccato sentences, most of which march along like the "Bolivian soldiers." A snapshot of New York life in the early 1980s, Bright Lights, Big City is a landmark novel for its insights into an era. Mary Whipple