![]() ![]() ![]() They are tired and muddy from their long march through the night. Your brain at this moment is composed of brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers. There must be a million ways to describe being high on cocaine. We all dreamed of working at The New Yorker (the narrator works at an unnamed magazine’s Department of Factual Verification that was remarkably similar, it was said, to the Condé Nast publication, where McInerney briefly worked as a fact-checker) and hitting the hottest clubs every night.īut Bright Lights, Big City resonated with us not just for the subject matter, but because the writing was so good. To publishing drones, McInerney was a folk hero of almost Kerouac-esque proportions. McInerney’s second-person protagonist was the voice we thought we needed to guide us through our salad days. ![]() At the publishing house where I had my first job as an editorial assistant, you could not swing a manuscript without hitting a copy of the book on a desk, in a tote bag, or mislaid on a table in the copying room. Jay McInerney’s first novel, a tale of love and loss and nightclubs and redemption was hailed, at least by everyone I knew, as a brilliant slice of twentysomething GenX life–plus or minus the cocaine, of course. And even then, clearly the Times book reviewer did not. I guess you had to be there to appreciate the novel at the time. “A clever, breezy–and in the end, facile documentary,” was what they said. The New York Times was not impressed with Bright Lights, Big City when it first appeared in 1984. ![]()
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