You're at a Club in NYC...
- Julie Heming
- Jan 20, 2019
- 2 min read
...and the lights pulse in your head, reminding you of the sun that is, by now, surely rising outside. It's nearly 6 a.m. and maybe you aren't in a club but are still curled up in your favorite reading chair, and the light in your eyes isn't a disco ball, but the actual sun peeking through your windows because you stayed up reading Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney until the wee hours, until you were finished, because the book was just that good.
I picked up this book up for $2, and it was the best $2 I've spent in a long while. The sustained use of second person and balance of humor, ridiculousness, and touching delicacy make this an amazing book all the more powerful for its brevity (less than 200 pages, my friends!).
In it, an unnamed narrator stumbles from club to bar at night, snorting coke from strangers, trying to pick up girls, ultimately failing to get both girls and a satisfying high. He's got a solid education, a job at a prestigious magazine, and a marriage to a famous model.
But he's in danger of being fired, his wife leaves for Paris and never comes back, and he can't keep himself from falling into night after night of drugs, drinks, and dance.
It sounds depressing, but it isn't. The second person point of view lends both hilarity and an intimate closeness with the character. There are extravagant friends, terrible bosses, and mishap romances. The at times raving and wild narrator numbs himself with drugs, gets kicked out of a fancy fashion show, and lets a ferret loose in his office. But this craziness stroked with dark humor, sarcasm, and irony is touched with musings on life purpose, love, and loss.
One paragraph made me laugh, and the next made me tear up. Emotional and tonal balance between touching moments and humor is hard to strike without being cliche or cheesy, but Bright Lights, Big City does it perfectly, with a unique voice and telling of what it's like to be finding yourself and coming to terms with your life in a city.
"You tried to tell her, as well as you could, what it was like being you. You described the feeling you always had of being misplaced, of always standing to one side of yourself, of watching yourself in the world even as you were in the world, and wondering if this was how everyone felt. That you always believed that other people had a clearer idea of what they were doing, and didn't worry quite so much about why."
I tend to be quite stingy with my 10's, but this one deserved it.
10/10 📕
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