BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY: Much before the loss of the innocence

Jay McInerney’s funny and smart debut “Bright Lights, Big City” was published about 25 years ago. The current Vintage Contemporary edition features in its cover a drawing of a men entering the Odeon and the Twin Towers in the background – as if we all needed to remember this was a book written much before the loss of the innocence.

The set is New York in the middle 1980s, when AIDS wasn’t the issue and the city fuelled with cocaine and neon. That decade always seem to be something lost in time. And literature and cinema handles it this way. “Bight Lights, Big City” is sort of a lighter and smarter cousin of “American Psycho”, which handles the same generation. But McInerney’s prose is much well handed and his narrative more effective than Breat Easton Ellis’. The novel is entirely written in the second person, and it feels like `you’ is just one more character.

Rarely did a writer capture the 1980s zeitgeist as McInerney. We see his nameless protagonist frantically crossing the city after drugs, women or something he lost in his life and doesn’t know. The plot unfolds in a New York minute. The writer has the ear for capturing vivid and believable dialogues, while creating interesting characters.

However fun it is to read “Bright Lights, Big City”, it is impossible not to notice that it is above all a sad story. The main character is only going through the motions, just the course life takes. He never takes the plunge to change his destiny. Could he if he tried? Maybe so. We’ll never know. But what we do know is that McInerney has written a novel that will last for ages. When people in the future wonders how the 1980s was like