Bright Lights, Big City in Reading with Style

Oct 07, 2014 Claire Jefferies rated it really liked it

Shelves: favorites, own-it, coming-of-age, faves-of-2015

I was really surprised by how much I enjoyed this novel. It gets very mixed reviews - people either seem to love it or hate it, and I guess I fall on the love side (this was really a 4.5 for me).

The general complaints about this book seem to be that it's about a rich, spoiled white kid who does a bunch of cocaine and has no redeeming qualities - readers kind of can't stand the main character, it seems. Frankly, this baffles me a bit. While the character (who remains unnamed) is what I would call I was really surprised by how much I enjoyed this novel. It gets very mixed reviews - people either seem to love it or hate it, and I guess I fall on the love side (this was really a 4.5 for me).

The general complaints about this book seem to be that it's about a rich, spoiled white kid who does a bunch of cocaine and has no redeeming qualities - readers kind of can't stand the main character, it seems. Frankly, this baffles me a bit. While the character (who remains unnamed) is what I would call "privileged" - Ivy League educated, works for a Prestigious Magazine that I have a hunch is the New Yorker, although it's never named, married a beautiful girl from the midwest who ends up becoming a model in NYC. And yes, there is a lot of drug use in this novel. So on the surface, I can see how this would annoy some of the audience.

However, I don't get how you could actually read this book and come away with the notion that this guy is simply a spoiled jerk, The End. He demonstrates time and time again that he has heart, that he cares about his colleagues (even if he fails to follow through with his intentions, they are genuine), that he is grieving parts of his past so profoundly life-changing (I won't put any spoilers here) that the situations would cause anyone to react in ways that might not resemble their best selves.* And the main character knows this - some of the most disarming parts of this character are the times when he has been out partying all night, screwing up his work assignments, etc., and then pauses to reflect that in his better, imagined life, he is the kind of guy who enjoys coming home at night to curl up in his comfy chair and read books and share his life with someone smart and interesting. He has created a cocoon of safety and maturity and a life full of small but frequent pleasures. My take is that he's very aware of his two selves in conflict - the one that's acting out, poorly, in response to his losses, and the one that yearns to be something so much better.

This is one of the best coming of age novels I've read since The Moviegoer. Readers have compared this to The Catcher in the Rye, but I just don't see the main character in this book to be nearly as outwardly callous and cynical as Holden Caulfield. Perhaps it struck a chord with me because I also experienced a similar loss at a similar age and it turned me into a self-destructive, self-absorbed jerk for a while. McInerney, to me, captures all the angst and longing and unfulfilled promises of early adulthood in a way that is honest and true, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

*This loss, by the way, isn't revealed until late in the book, which was interesting to me - you have to get through a lot of this guy's really poor life choices before understanding what might be causing him to act this way. I think that this was particularly effective in showing how judgmental we can be towards others who make poor choices or act erratically, when what we really should be doing is trying to understand why that person hurts, what's causing the behavior. Because almost everyone who is a jerk on the outside is usually suffering a lot of pain on the inside. ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Nov 14, 2007 Joanna rated it really liked it

Shelves: rws-2011-winter, 2012-read

Really about 3.5 stars. This book tells the story of Manhattan in the coke-addled 1980s for twenty-somethings suffering their own version of existential angst and "quarter-life crises." The use of the second person to drive home the lead character was interesting and there were definite moments of brilliance in the writing. But I still felt like the book was mostly a lot of navel-gazing about a failed marriage and a lousy job in the Fact Verification Department of an unnamed fancy magazine. I wa ...more

1 like · Like · see review