Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney

I was given a copy of this novel more than thirty years ago, not long after it was published, but, with what might, sadly, have been characteristic ingratitude at that time, I had stowed it away on a bookshelf somewhere, unread and largely forgotten. Looking back, I am not sure what had put me off reading it? The story does, after all, explore similar territory to one of my favourite films of that period, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, but somehow the book never quite managed to call out to me.

What brought me to dig it out after all this time was a chance viewing of an excellent documentary that Jay McInerney presented on BBC4, called Sincerely F Scott Fitzgerald. McInerney has never been crippled with shyness about his own standing as a writer, as evinced in the opening salvo of that documentary: “New York is a lucky city, at least as far as literature is concerned. Every few decades it produces a writer who tells its stories, its triumphs, its tragedies, its comedies, its romance. About thirty years ago the job fell to me, Jay McInerney. A fair number of reviewers of my first novel, Bright Lights, big City, invoked the name of F Scott Fitzgerald.” 

Having loved The Great Gatsby since I first read it back in the Sixth Form of Loughborough Grammar School, and returning to reread it every few years (and I sense yet another revisitation coming very shortly), but knowing nothing about McInerney himself or his writing, I considered this a very bold claim. I might have set this vaunting claim aside, had I not found the documentary to be wonderful. McInerney talked about Fitzgerald’s life, writing, alcoholism, infidelity and mental fragility with great insight and sensitivity, illustrated with a wealth of quotations from his letters and works. I was so impressed that I decided his novel deserved a reading, as a mark of gratitude.

The story concerns a disaffected young man who works as a fact checker for a highly respected magazine (possibly modelled on The New Yorker). After living in New York for a couple of years he finds that his life is starting to come apart. His beautiful wife, Amanda, a fashion model whose career has had recently had a meteoric rise, has left him, failing to return from a photo shoot arranged in Paris. In a state of deep denial, he has not told anyone about this, apart from his friend Tad Allagash. Work is difficult, too: he had always dreamt of being a writer, and had submitted various pieces to the magazine’s fiction department, although these had all been rejected. This repeated failure to have his own writing published has led to a growing resentment about his own role, which he sees as propping up other writers who had not taken sufficient care to authenticate their own facts.

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Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney is available to buy on Amazon