Flashback, August 1984: Jay McInerney’s Bestseller on the Darkness Behind ‘Bright Lights’

Acclaimed for its unusual second-person narration and its seriocomic take on a coke-addled literary wannabe, Bright Lights, Big City kick-started Random House’s high-quality paperback line, Vintage Contemporaries, when it was released in August 1984.

It also changed the life of its 29-year-old author, Jay McInerney, who was trying to make ends meet as a part-time clerk in a liquor-store while still a year and a half into a Ph.D. program in English literature at Syracuse University.

The success of the novel—700,000 copies sold in its first year, and tens of thousands annually in the years since—enabled the author’s Williams College classmate and best friend Gary Fisketjon to bring a host of acclaimed other authors under his Vintage Contemporaries imprint, including McInerney’s mentor and grad school teacher Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Richard Russo, Don DeLillo, Peter Matthiessen, and Thomas McGuane.

But early fame also left McInerney with the kind of question that, for instance, John O’Hara had to deal with because of his debut, Appointment in Samarra: What do you do for an encore when many people consider your first book your best?

Or, just as telling: how do you keep from succumbing to the distractions and temptations of fame and success?

By McInerney’s own admission, none of his later works came as easily as Bright Lights, Big City. Its first line (“You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning”) originated from a scrap of paper he’d written after returning from a nightclub at about four in the morning, when, with closing time night, he couldn’t find his cocaine, money, the girl he was pursuing, or his best friend.

Staying up all night, McInerney cranked out a short story, “It’s Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?” that ended up accepted by Paris Review editor George Plimpton.

Thereafter, the plot for a full novel seemed to flow organically from that morning-after voice, he said in a 2020 Paris Review interview with Lucas Wittman—finished in six weeks.

Like the Jimmy Reed song that provided its title, the novel serves as a cautionary tale about the allures and dangers of urban life, and the personal losses and desperate need for help they occasion.

At the time, reviewers knew enough about McInerney’s life to know that it mirrored events and people in his debut novel, particularly in the unnamed protagonist’s job (soon lost) as a fact-checker at a New Yorker-style magazine:

·         “The Druid,” the publication’s editor-in-chief, is near-sighted, formal, and famously elusive, such that “While you have never actually seen a Victorian clerk, you believe this is what one would look like"—all of which sounds an awful lot like The New Yorker’s William Shawn.

·         “The Ghost,” a longtime staff member with an epic case of writer’s block, resembles Joseph Mitchell, who visited the offices daily for 30 years before his death without producing anything.

·        The narrator gets into trouble when his bosses discover that he lied on his resume about knowing French—just as McInerney did when, forced to check facts in a Jane Kramer piece about the French elections, he failed to catch major errors.

When I saw McInerney lecture at Fairleigh Dickinson University (FDU) in the 1990s, he said he had not frankly admitted when the book came out that, like his narrator, he had taken cocaine. In the 1980s, he explained, a stigma still existed towards users.

I’m not sure that this initial coyness really mattered, however. So much else seemed to fit the facts of his life—to ring with a kind of special knowledge, put another way—that I believe nearly every reader assumed that McInerney was writing directly from experience.

Looking for a catch-all title for young writers with an urban sensibility, New York Magazine resorted to a trick it had used to (mis)classify up-and-coming actors. The “Literary Brat Pack” of McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz, and Donna Tartt didn’t care for that label any more than Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, Ally Sheedy, and Molly Ringwald had enjoyed being called “The Brat Pack.” 

It might have done McInerney more good if, in the several years immediately following Bright Lights, Big City, he had avoided further exploration of New York’s nightlife. He made himself an obvious target for critics more inclined to review who he was dating (e.g., after his second divorce, model Marla Hanson) or dining with (Ellis).

Brightness Falls (1992) furnished McInerney with the opportunity to take a more wide-angle view of the Reagan years by concentrating on a couple who were the envy of their friends. For a frank admirer of F. Scott Fitzgerald, comparisons to Tender Is the Night inevitably followed.

At the FDU lecture and book-signing, McInerney identified Brightness Falls as his favorite book. I don’t believe this was simply an author’s feeling that he had put all he had learned into what he had just finished, because McInerney has returned to his couple Russell and Corinne Calloway in two subsequent novels that examined how his generation coped with the necessary compromises involved with work, intimacy, and maturity: The Good Life (2006) and Bright Precious Days (2016).

Nevertheless, it remains the case that he remains overwhelmingly tied to his first book. In 2006, Time Magazine listed Bright Lights, Big City as one of nine generation-defining novels of the 20^th century.

It’s not because of the plot, which falls into a recognizable genre: a Bildungsroman (or “coming-of-age” tale) about a young person hitting rock bottom in a compressed period, like J.D. Salinger’s’ The Catcher in the Rye, or a cocaine equivalent of Charles Jackson’s pioneering tale of alcoholism, The Lost Weekend.

What made the novel distinctive was its voice—certainly the second-person narration, but not limited to that. Readers also took to the rich vein of comic irony referring to the “comet trail of white powder,” “Bolivian Marching Powder,” and the confusion inside the narrator’s head (“You are a republic of voices. Unfortunately, the republic is Italy”).

That tone is more subdued in his more expansive, ambitious later work. Critics continue to become caught up in McInerney’s personal life (his fourth and latest wife is the heiress Ann Hearst), and his two collections of wine essays, no matter how well written they might be, surely lead some observers to wonder if his attention and energy haven’t been diverted.

These critics might practice a bit more charity. Writing even one book is no easy feat. McInerney has written eight novels and one collection of short stories. Others have produced far less.

With that being said, I hope we see more of his work soon. Hard-won maturity may, in the long run, be better than being a “voice of a generation.”