Book Club: Bright Lights, Big City

Jay McInerney’s book about a week of hedonism in New York in the early eighties is like a garish postcard from a vanished world. Bright Lights, Big City made the career of a writer who was then in his mid-twenties because, as he told this month’s group of Bookclub readers, it caught the city at a moment of social and cultural drama. It had virtually gone bankrupt, there was a heroin epidemic as obvious to everyone in Manhattan as violence on the streets, and the middle classes were indulging in cocaine without a thought about addiction. There was madness in the air. The AIDS crisis was just around the corner, and a certain wildness ruled.

The novel is the account of a week in the life of a nameless young man – he’s referred to throughout in the second person, simply as ‘You’ – who isn’t McInerney’s double but who lives some of the life that the writer knew, when he was often in what is often euphemistically referred to as ‘an altered state of mind’, thanks to drink – or more usually – drugs. And looking back on the book, more than thirty years on, McInerney talked interestingly about his ambiguous relationship with the city.

It was true, he said, that you’re now much less likely to have your apartment burgled by an addict or to be mugged on the streets than in the old days, or to hear ‘crack vials cracking underfoot’ but he’s certain that something has been lost. For him, the city seems less diverse, and despite the no-go zones of the past there was something attractive about its edges – when there were ‘islands of civilisation’ where people still lived in property with cheap rents – that represent, for him, something lost. He told us, ‘I’ve never fallen out of love with New York City and as much as this is a terrible week portrayed in Bright Lights, Big City, I think it’s also infused with a love of Manhattan. ‘

This may be why the book still has power. Many of our readers had read when it first appeared, appreciating the account of one lost week in the life of a young man who had many lost weeks – and celebrated them, whatever the physical and emotional cost. The city that never sleeps has a strong pull on so many people, whether they’ve read Damon Runyon or not, that owes a lot to the strong undercurrent of over-indulgence, chicanery and even violence that seems to flow across town even now. There was bohemia in Greenwich Village, absurd excesses of wealth on the Upper East Side and along Park Avenue but somehow it mixed a cocktail that was always worth a sip. You’d never forget it.

One reader said it had shaped all her imagination about New York when she first read it. She’d never been there, but it came to life. For myself, having first set foot there as a young student in 1970, I understand exactly what that means. The pace, the smells, the noise and the voices seem impossible to imagine in that particular combination, anywhere else. When you come across the 59th St Bridge from the airport into the ferment of Manhattan for the first time you’re likely to be smitten. If you don’t like it; stay away. If not, you’re probably at the start of a hectic love affair.

McInerney’s book is about a place that for ‘You’ seemed to have no rules, and maybe promised destruction in the end. But it was still intoxicating. That’s why so many people read Bright Lights, Big City and still do.

I hope you enjoy hearing him.

Happy reading

Jim