Name: Bright Lights, Big City
ISBN: 9780224022910

Jay McInerney

Bright Lights, Big City

You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might become clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then again, it might not... So begins our nameless hero's trawl through the brightly lit streets of Manhattan, sampling all this wonderland has to offer yet suspecting that tomorrow's hangover may be caused by more than simple excess. Bright Lights, Big City is an acclaimed classic which marked Jay McInerney as one of the major writers of our time.

took a little while to get used to the second person narrative but i enjoyed this. 

jacq bridge

Colton Ray

I'd been wanting to read this for a while, ever since I heard about the 2nd person narration gimmick. I was afraid it would be as empty and pointless as Ellis' writing about similar subjects, but while I think its relevance is rapidly declining, it wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been. Sure, the subject matter will probably only be of interest to a certain fraction of white males, but it's fine for what it is.

Summer Stanley

How could I be so sympathetic to awful people? The revelations just kept coming. Enjoyable writing style.

Grace McCarter

Sophie Shrimpton

This is one of those rare books that is a perfect whole without trying to do everything. It does what it intended and it does it precisely and humorously.

Quotes:
“This cousin had a girlfriend with cheekbones to break your heart, and you knew she was the real thing when she steadfastly refused to acknowledge your presence. She possessed secrets - about islands, about horses, about French pronunciation - that you would never know.” 

“Perhaps because he suspects he is mortal, fiction that deals too directly with death is unwelcome here.” 

“You are also experiencing the inevitable disappointment of clubs. You enter with an anticipation that on the basis of past experience is entirely unjustified. You always seem to forget that you don’t really like to dance.”

“You keep thinking that with practice you will eventually get the knack of enjoying superficial encounters, that you will stop looking for the universal solvent, stop grieving. You will learn to compound happiness out of small increments of mindless pleasure.” 

“You did not feel that you could open quite all of your depths to her, or fathom hers, and sometimes you feared she didn’t have any depths. But you finally attributed this to an unrealistic, youthful idealism. Growing up meant admitting you couldn’t have everything.” 

“Eventually you ascend the stairs to the street. You think of Plato’s pilgrims climbing out of the cave, from the shadow world of appearances toward things as they really are, and you wonder if it is possible to change in this life. Being with a philosopher makes you think.” 

“You imagine her as a child carrying a bucket of sand down to the beach. You see yourself watching from the bluff, through a time warp, saying: Somday I will meet this girl. You want to watch over her through the interval, protect her from the cruelty of schoolchildren and the careless lust of young men.”

The ineffability of inner experience

“Now the vista is skewed slightly, someone has tilted the ground a few degrees, and everything is the same and not the same.”

“In the examination of personal libraries is an entire hermeneutics of character analysis.”

“You have always thought that Michael would make a great prosecuting attorney. He has an acute sense of universal guilt and a keen nose for circumstantial evidence.”

“You spent so much time in anticipation that when her death came you didn’t know what you felt.”

“You began to forget the way she looked then, and to see her somehow as young, younger than you had ever known her. The wasted flesh seemed illusory. You saw her as a young woman.”

“”I was standing in front of a mirror as if I’d never really seen my own face before.” You had to lean down close to hear. “I felt strange. I knew something had happened, but I didn’t know what.””

“You are too excited to think any more and too exhausted to sleep. If you lie down you are afraid you will die.”

Bright Lights, Big City

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