40 Years Later, Does ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ Still Resonate?

Late in the summer of 1984, as Nancy Reagan was bringing her “Just Say No” campaign to potential teenage drug hounds around the country, the publishing world was transfixed by a first novel set amid the fleeting, febrile pleasures of yes. Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City” arrived 40 years ago this week with an initial print run of 15,000 and a future that was hard to envision.

Maybe you were present at the creation, young, living in New York and over-identified with your literary pretensions — just like the book’s nameless hero, a mostly strung-out, apathetic research assistant at a patrician literary magazine. If you were, maybe you were not impressed.

Maybe you were not impressed. For some, an initial aversion was triggered by the novel’s signature narrative device, or gimmick, depending on your view — the story told in the second person. “You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head,” our cocaine-addled fact-checker tells us on the first page. “You shake a healthy snort onto the back of your hand.” McInerney arrived on the scene with a party-boy persona of his own, making it too easy to think of him smugly coming up with the conceit as the third bottle of Krug landed at the table — jotting down a note to himself on the back of a $50 bill to be reminded of his cleverness when he woke up next to a beautiful woman somewhere in SoHo the following afternoon. Tammy? Tamsin? He wouldn’t remember.

All that conjecture, invited by the writer’s emergent tabloid celebrity, made it too easy to dismiss the originality of the ploy, to overlook the sly utility of a form that created a necessary distance not only between the narrator and his inner self but more crucially between the narrator and his audience. Even as he is hit with setbacks that might otherwise provoke feelings of sympathy — a firing at the hands of a preening, fastidious boss; a destabilizing breakup marked by proto-ghosting — it is hard to shake the idea that he is basically ridiculous until the point at which that is no longer possible, until the distance contracts.

The considerable emotional impact of the book rests on a distinct shift in an understanding of the character — a turn from distaste for his nihilistic posturing toward a compassion for the pain, slowly revealed, that underlies it. The shallow 24-year old, spelunking his way through the night caves of Lower Manhattan, is driven not by the world-weary boredom of post-adolescent self-regard, we learn, but by a recent and profound loss, a grief immune to all the very 1980s ways he has tried to appease it.

That “Bright Lights, Big City” succeeds both as a psychologically meaningful coming-of-age story and a kind of satirical picaresque is surely the reason it has endured. The book has sold nearly a million copies and has never been out of print. McInerney’s editor, Gary Fisketjon, a friend from their days at Williams College, acquired it for $7,500, he told me recently; it had originated as a short story in The Paris Review, and he doubted the second-person voice could be sustained for the length of a novel.