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Apr 07, 2008

Jessica rated it:

Thanks to Bookface, you no longer get this book mixed up with American Psycho, and can now easily tell the difference between Bret Easton Ellis and Jay MacInerney. Good thing you cleared that right up before you embarrassed yourself at one of those writerly New York parties you're always getting invited to. It would've been awful to have spilled your drink on the wrong author, for the wrong reason.... whew!

This book is about how terrible people's lives were before the Internet was in More...

6 comments like (9 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Christina rated it:

I finished Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City a few weeks ago. There were many things I admired about this book. Although the use of second person narrative structure is initially a bit jarring, I soon became accustomed to the narrative voice, viewing it as authentic and thematically relevant.

McInerney's unnamed narrator is running from two things: his failed marriage and his mother's death. While the former event is extensively foreshadowed, the latter is not revealed until the More...

0 comments like (9 people liked it)

Nov 08, 2011

mark rated it:

perhaps the best things that i can say about this one is that it perfectly captured a perfectly nauseating time period in the mid-80s, and it certainly reinvigorated the use of second-person narrative with surprising elan; perhaps the worst thing i could say about this one is That It Drove Me Up The Wall With Its Pathetically Entitled Non-Entity Of A So-Called Protagonist And It Somehow Made It Okay To Be A Pretentious Whiny Twit And Nihilistic Fuck.

7 comments like (11 people liked it)

Feb 20, 2011

Meghan rated it:

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2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 28, 2011

Rebecca rated it:

I was almost tempted to give this five stars--an honor I've bestowed upon just two books all year. This book surprised me. Here was a character who, yes, snorts cocaine and passes out in bathrooms--but he has a conscience. The second-person narrative is effortless.

McInerney is a part of the "literary brat pack," so his work is lumped in along with Bret Easton Ellis's. I remember Less than Zero as a confusing jumble of drug-feuled ramblings about ex-girlfriends, overdoses, More...

3 comments like (3 people liked it)

May 22, 2008

Liz rated it:

Is this really a book all New Yorkers have to read? That's how it was brought to my attention and, perhaps because of that, I found it disappointingly 80s. I was expecting the city to be more of a character but instead it's all coke and bars and mocking of lit magazines - Gawker before Gawker existed. I feel like "Bright Lights, Big City" belongs on a shelf with "American Psycho" and "Bonfire of the Vanities." The literary brat pack connection is obvious, the To More...

5 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 29, 2007

Shepherd rated it:

You get used to reading a novel in second person pretty quickly, so it's not really that annoying. You enjoy how quickly the pages turn, how quickly the plot flows. It's a fun read, if not a deep one. You recognize the parallels with your own life, but don't feel the need to dwell on this. You end up liking the main character, even though you know he's an asshole. You're a bit resistant to some implied moralizing at the end, but you let it go. And you will make use of the metaphor of cocai More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Jan 19, 2012

James rated it:

I put off reading this book for a while because I assumed that the 2nd person narrative would be jarring and read more like a 'choose your own adventure' than an enjoyable novel, but man, was I wrong. After the first page, I no longer noticed the perspective. McInerney conquers the 2nd person so well, that by the end of the novel, its merely a side point because the rest of the novel is so strong.

Bright Lights, Big City read like a New York version of Less Than Zero but much more More...

0 comments like

Dec 09, 2011

Stacy rated it:

I have wanted to read this book ever since I saw the film as a child and understood a grand total of nothing about it. Haha! All I gleaned from the 1989 TV viewing was that Marty McFly was running around looking like shit and doing bad things in scary-ass NYC. I'm very glad that I waited until I was a 14-year New Yorker to read it. I finally understand why McInerney is such a bigshot in this town. Man, can he paint it with words (in the second-person, no less)! I honestly don't see how it could More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 10, 2011

Wendy rated it:

The innovative use of second person narrative in Bright Lights, Big City is one of several literary traits McInerney utilises in order to represent the protagonist’s failure to locate himself within a personal identity. By calling the protagonist “you” and, in effect, projecting the identity crisis of the protagonist directly onto the reader, McInerney creates a character who has divorced identity from self, and does not see the former as a reasonable manifestation of the latter.

The More...

0 comments like

Oct 05, 2011

Nicole rated it:

I may be on an '80's kick right now. Between Bret Easton Ellis and a not-so-long-ago viewing of Brat Pack films, I am immersed in the overindulgent culture of the 1980's all over again. Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney is no exception.

Focusing on the decadence afforded to even those who were broke in New York City in this time period, McInerney's narrative focuses on our faceless and nameless main man who is reeling from his wife's abandonment of their marriage and his hated More...

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Aug 06, 2011

Steve rated it:

If Jay McInerney and Brett Easton Ellis are brothers in prose, then McInerney is definitely the quieter one, less interested in chainsawing you to pieces, and more interested in just being your friend.

"You" being the key word here, as McInerney's debut novel is told exclusively in the second person point of view (You do this. You do that. You find yourself in a bathroom stall, snorting Bolivian marching powder with a green-haired punk/model, etc, etc). But the POV never ge More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 12, 2011

Jenny rated it:

In the mood to read another New York book, I picked up Bright Lights, Big City the modern classic published in 1984 about a young man, lost in life, trying to find himself in NYC. This book has been lauded by the likes of authors Jonathan Tropper and Jen Lancaster (who titled her book after, Bright Lights, Big Ass, in reference to it). Time magazine also named it one of its nine generation-defining novels.

Therefore, I had big expectations for this novel. For the most part it met my exp More...

0 comments like

Jan 24, 2010

Paul rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like

Nov 05, 2009

Heidi rated it:

This is one of those books I missed when it first came out... while the 1980s was my "coming of age" decade, I was a few years behind McInerney and company. All I knew about this book was that is spawned a not so good movie (sorry Michael J Fox-- love you but without even seeing the flick I can see you were miscast) and that it was supposed to be the voice of the 20-something generation in the early '80s.

It was definitely a walk down memory lane of what was hot in the early/m More...

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May 31, 2009

Clare added it

A surprise - a good one. Previously I had read of Jay McInerney only his New Yorker profile of Chloe Sevigny just-post-Kids (excellent) and his 9/11 novel, The Good Life (much less so.) But Bright Lights, Big City goes back another decade, to the early eighties, when Times Square still swarmed with prostitutes and drugs (and Bryant Park wasn't nearly so clean), Tribeca was affordable (and there was no film festival), and the Twin Towers marked the sky. And maybe it's because I'm feeling sentim More...

0 comments like

Jan 04, 2012

Christina Marie rated it:

Here's a novel that you start to read, get really into it, and then suddenly, you finish it and you're left thinking, "what the hell just happened?" It's so much but it's very little. It's a simply story but complex. It's in second person, so you're in the story, just like I was in the story, but I'm not in it any more because I finished it. That's the genius of Jay McInerny.

I kept thinking about Brett Easton Ellis as I read. The 80s. The Yuppies. The city. The business wor More...

0 comments like

May 19, 2010

Jake rated it:

I didn't expect to enjoy "Bright Lights, Big City", because the premise sounds so vile: cocaine-addled yuppie cracks up amid the glitzy world of 1980s Manhattan. But from the first pages, I realized something no one had ever told me about McInerney: he's a very funny writer. What's more, he makes the main character very sympathetic, so despite all the ridiculous, self-indulgent bullshit he pulls, you don't feel like he's a bad person, and you want him to be okay in the end. McInerne More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 02, 2009

Scott rated it:

If Delillo is the master philosopher of the post-modern novel, Rushdie the satiric fantasist, and Bret Easton Ellis the brazen provocateur, then, based solely upon this, my initial introduction, Jay MacInerney seems to be the genre's humanist. For a book that laments the breakdown of human identity and significance in 80s New York, where even the very fate of literature and film is left in the hands of "pygmies" where giants once stood, the tenderness of the book's final 50 pages come More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Feb 16, 2009

Dayna rated it:

Well, I have always kind of avoided reading this book. I thought I knew exactly what this was about - rich, white guys doing cocaine in 80s New York. I thought it was going to be totally predictable, but I was very wrong. I guess I didn't know what this book was really about - and I really liked it. I also typically dislike books that "try" to be funny, but the humor in this is kind of dark and inherent to the situations - it's not joky. I love the characters he works with at the magaz More...

0 comments like

Feb 13, 2009

John rated it:

You decide to read this book because it was written in the second person. This is interesting to you. You've never read a book written in that manner, at least you can't remember if you have. This seems like a pretentious idea to you, but you are curious. You like the book more than you expected to. It isn't all that dated. Sure, lots of NYC landmarks have changed, but the gist is still the same. You identify with the main character. You decide that if you lived in NYC in 1984, this would probab More...

3 comments like (5 people liked it)

Aug 31, 2009

Mythili rated it:

I read this book and thought, huh, people really did do a lot of cocaine in New York in the 80s.

Bright Lights, Big City has all the despair cloaked in decadence, self-hatred and self-aggrandizement of one of New York magazine's most pathetic (and sexless) "Sex Diaries" --- and has about the same heft. Fortunately it's about as much fun to read too. McInerney's narrator slowly falls apart with the right measure of self-awareness and wit (on a last-ditch ill-conceived attempt More...

1 comment like

Feb 03, 2010

Erin rated it:

Now a quarter of a centry old, Bright Lights, Big City does occasionally come across as a little dated in 2010, but this does nothing to diminish the humor and sharpness of the writing. If anything, the pure 80s atmosphere lends an unintended level of humor to the narrative. However, some of the references may be lost on Gen Y readers; for example, The New Yorker is regarded differently now than it was when McInerney worked there and the openness of the New York drug culture of the 1980s may se More...

0 comments like

Oct 11, 2009

Maureen rated it:

" ' read hazlitt,' he says. 'that's my advice. read hazlitt and write before breakfast every day.' " p. 84

" a well-bred young woman, something of an intellect, who would not be charmed by some junior account exec with toothpaste market surveys on the brain. this assignment calls for nothing less than a speaker of french, a reader of the new york review of books and that inexpressible guileless charm with which your name is synonymous. don't let me down, coach, and ever More...

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Jun 22, 2010

Lee rated it:

Part of my ongoing summer reading project, filling the not-so-gaping hole in my literary soul known as "The Brat Pack." Turns out, McInerney is NOT Bret Easton Ellis: McInerney's sentences seem tighter/more composed, clearer, sparser, plus he's more traditional, less willing to temporarily disorient a reader (all based on a very limited scan of their literary DNA so far). I like reading these books because they have semi-trashy reputatons, so I come to them with low expectations they e More...

0 comments like

Feb 07, 2009

Eric rated it:

A novel about a 24-year-old fact-checker at a prestigious New York magazine was inevitably going to resonant somewhat with this reader. It's cliche to liken McInerney's book to the coke that fuels much of its action—-exciting, highly addictive, and, ultimately, a fleeting confection--but Bright Lights, Big City sets itself up for such a simile. For literature buffs, and especially New Yorker lovers, there's plenty of candy throughout. We meet barely veiled likenesses of longtime New Yorker edito More...

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Aug 06, 2010

Paul rated it:

I’ve had this book on the shelf for awhile, and I decided it was finally time to read it, if nothing else than because it was so short.

I wasn’t prepared to be enthralled with the story of a young, New York City man working at the Factual Verification department at a well-known magazine. I like these type stories as much as the next person, but it just isn’t the type of story I’ve been reading lately. Fortunately, this story had a huge impact on me because I feel that I read it at th More...

0 comments like

Jul 28, 2011

Suncan added it

It is funny, but in the very short period that I was reading this book, or had it on my table waiting to be read, quite a few people recognised the title and commented that they have read it or seen the film... this is something that does not happen often (well not to me anyway), so it seems to be a well read (or at least known) book, which is why I suppose it is a Bloomsbury classic even though it was published for the first time only in 1984... Anyroad, a quick read, more like a long short sto More...

0 comments like

Sep 08, 2009

Katherine rated it:

I loved this book. I read it mostly because I'd been told it was a classic in writing exercises - it's in the second person, and so more than one writing teacher had preached to me about it's originality in its use of "you," an originality I was encouraged never to replicate, only to admire. But I liked the book as much more than an exercise. Admittedly, the coke addled days of mid-80's NYC aren't really a period with which I'm familiar, but there was a lot to recognize in the book More...

0 comments like

Feb 11, 2012

Harmonybites rated it:

Recently I tried a book given to me by a friend that didn't click for me. My friend said, I guess this was your Bright Lights, Big City--a book I recommended to her. Humor is a funny, very individual thing, and this is one of my favorite books, while my friend hated it and abandoned it mid-read. It might help that I'm a native New Yorker. I admit I got a kick at seeing my city through the narrator's eyes and recognizing such things as the manic energy, the emptiness of the club scene, the insani More...

2 comments like

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