Bright Lights, Big City (1984) by Jay McInerney

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Bright, Lights, Big City (1984)

by Jay McInerney

Manhattan: 30/33

New York: 79/105

  I can't believe that American Psycho didn't make it into the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America. How on earth can you create a literary map of Manhattan without the office and restaurant scenes in American Psycho.  My sense is that editor Susan Straight is determined to keep things PG unless it involves sex abuse suffered by the protagonist of a POV novel when she is a young girl- there are plenty of those scenes.  Instead she has picked Bright Lights, Big City as her stand-in for the coked-out excesses of 1980's New York City.

  My impression is that Bright Lights, Big City was part of the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die list- but in preparing this post I realized it wasn't on that list, and that I'd never posted about Bright Lights, Big City.  Certainly I've read it.  I still remember of the cover of the Vintage paperback edition I read...it must have been in college or law school.  Maybe high school, actually. I know I read Less Than Zero before high school so it makes sense I would have read Bright Lights, Big City as well.

  Decades on I can still remember the feverish tone and the difficulties of being a New Yorker fact checker at day and a partying coke-fiend at night.  I remember being amused by the idea that in the early 1980's you could work as a fact checker and afford to be a degenerate coke addict at the very same time, which never seemed plausible to me, even as a high school/college student with no practical experience in the work place.