Contemplating New York: In a City With Everything, What Do You Want?
Bright Lights, Big City
I share things I’ve enjoyed on Sundays, and I publish an essay, story, or book review on Thursdays (a slight change). This is a book review of Bright Lights, Big City with no spoilers. You can enjoy it even if you haven’t read the book.
One generally moves to New York because he has a head filled with inappropriate ambitions or a throat parched by insatiable desires or both. The house looks stable from across the river, but, a few months after the move, the newcomer realizes that he has chosen to lock himself into an asylum, expensive and electrifying. The drain has opened; the stagnant water in which he stood has become a whirlpool.
This experience is typically reserved for men and women in their mid-twenties—in the period that Fitzgerald describes as the very acme of bachelorhood—who are endangered because of a want of money or too much for their age; because of a prefrontal cortex still mushy; because of an omnipotent environment of too much temptation; because of a life full of time and devoid of responsibility. They rejoice in spinning around the water and only screech when they slam into the walls.
For such people, despite the intricate differences of their circumstances, New York represents a shared world that they discover together on Thursdays and hide from on Sundays and disparage on Mondays. The cycle repeats, heads nod, voices clamber; but there remains the feeling that more must be said in more careful language, that the experience must be stamped into time more permanently. It is a task that supports the writer’s vocation, which the wise denizen looks over later, alone, and decides whether what is before him lines up or goes astray.
Forty years ago, New York lauded Bright Lights, Big City as its generational novel, a stature that remains intact today; it rose to the challenge of capturing the city through the lens of a twenty-four year-old transplant who is crushed and lifted, in the same breath, by Manhattan’s stress and splendor.
The decision of the author, Jay McInerney, to use the second-person singular—you—increases the pace of an already racing novel to the point where the rider fears that the wheels are going to fall off. But he is able to successfully continue the trick through the next two hundred forty pages, and the effect of the language and the familiar scenes gives the native New Yorker the sensation he has been exactly there; perhaps, one hundred years on, it will transport posterity to a land lost.
You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then again, it might not. A small voice inside you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is a result of too much of that already. The night has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where two A.M. changes to six A.M. You know this moment has come and gone, but you are not yet willing to concede that you have crossed the line beyond which all is gratuitous damage and the palsy of unraveled nerve endings.
Bright Lights, Big City, page 1
There have been many books set in The Big Apple, but McInerney boldly crosses into what was then desolate terrain. Predating American Psycho, written by Bret Ellis, an old running pal of McInerney’s, Bright Lights, Big City shines a new light on the turbulent party scene and the drug that formed the crumbling cornerstone of the eighties.
The themes that it highlights and the places it takes us to give it a staying power in the present day. At the time, there were nearly two thousand homicides recorded, compared to two hundred ninety-five in 2018, a drop of more than eighty percent; yet, in the pages, we only pass the squalor when a prostitute pulls up a skirt or a man sells a ferret on the street, sights that would not give pause to a New Yorker today.
And even though he mostly brings us to parts gentrified—drugged out nightclubs, fashion parties, work cubicles—every scene of the book is rife with conflict. Most of these battles take place in the workplace or on the dance floor; their benign nature focuses the work on qualms that continue to plague the modern man in his comfortability.
Its main discord arises from the divide between how the protagonist wants to be and how he really is. New York widens the schism through its ubiquitous and painfully accessible lure that feeds on lack of will; routinely, the narrator makes short-term decisions misaligned with his more wholesome self-identification: fact-checking weighs down his dream of fiction-writing before the apartment door buzzes and drinking dissolves the rest of it.
At the intercom is a hedonist, Tad Allagash, who acts in faithful accordance with his own principles. When others are tired, he alone beats the city’s drum by pulling peers out of bed to join his endless march, and the failing hero is swept away in the wild fantasy of his eyes, in the hope that his promises will come true:
How did you get here? It was your friend, Tad Allagash, who powered you in here, and he has disappeared. Tad is the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. He is either your best self or your worst self, you’re not sure which… 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 are awed by his strict refusal to acknowledge any goal higher than the pursuit of pleasure. You want to be like that. You also think it is shallow and dangerous.
Bright Lights, Big City, page 2
If the protagonist’s goal is a tranquil happiness free from the trappings of the town, Allagash can be thought of as one of the book’s few villains. He is neither malevolent nor immoral, but wholly selfish; he goes through the world without a care for another’s intentions. I am reminded of Stiva, Tolstoy’s most diabolical character in Anna Karenina, whose malignancy oozes out of a charming amorality. He reminds the reader how common it is to fall in and stay with various friend groups unconsciously, tethered to them only by momentum, despite their insidious effects. McInerney points this out through his own weakness: his decisions are as natural a consequence of his environment as starvation is in another.
But I am not sure if the narrator truly wants what he proclaims; maybe Allagash should be spared of ire. The contradiction between his purported desires and his actions is so stark that it is humorous and difficult to take seriously: he sounds more akin to a friend claiming that he’ll never drink again after one of the best weekends of his life.
This irony, I’m sure, has sent many to the nearest club. But, as I reflect on it, I find myself ignoring that part of the narrator’s tune. Now, I am meditating on how I can live more healthily and happily in the city. In this sense, it is a far cry from the debaucheries that Henry Miller hungrily accepts in Tropic of Cancer and Ernest Hemingway romanticizes in The Sun Also Rises and Jack Kerouac savors in On the Road—all of which are liable to throw me into some sort of spree.
All in all, however one reads it, Bright Lights, Big City is a springtime book optimistic in its belief that we are all capable of bloom, that we always have the opportunity to strive for what we are after. More than all else, it asks: In a city with everything, what exactly do you want?
Thanks for reading! Next Sunday, I’ll share what I enjoyed this week; next Thursday, I’ll publish a short story.
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Insightful review and I am definitively going to read Bright Lights, Big City! I also like your characterization of how life in New York can influence you - "...For such people, despite the intricate differences of their circumstances, New York represents a shared world they discover on Thursdays, and hide from on Sundays and disparage on Mondays." So true!