Bright Lights, Big City

The definitive account of being young and lost in excess-ridden 1980s NYC
Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney’s novel of semi-ritzy folk in mid ’80s Manhattan, is uniquely suited to audio form, thanks to its author’s unusual decision to write in the second-person. “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning,” the book begins, setting the tone. “But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy.”

Read aloud, the second-person voice is a direct address to the listener — it’s hard not to be enthralled when your identity mingles with that of a protagonist both as charismatic and hopelessly lost as McInerney’s. The novel opens at a nightclub, “either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge,” in the early hours of the morning. Drugs are being consumed. Women with shaved heads are propositioned. “Your brain at this moment,” in fact, “is composed of brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers. They are tired and muddy from their long march through the night.”

McInerney’s nameless anti-hero is a fact-checker at a New Yorker-like magazine with a fashion model wife and ambitions to ditch menial labor in favor of a writing career. He also has a fondness for cocaine and a dwindling supply of self-respect — the last of which threatens to evaporate completely if he keeps up the party-boy antics.

Energetic and perfectly crafted, McInerney’s prose verges at times on a beauty that rivals — truly — Fitzgerald. That second-person voice works against all odds and, twenty-five years after its original publication, McInerney’s account of a young mover in the excessive New York of the 1980s still dazzles.