In a World with Everything, What Do You Really Want?

Reflections on one of the great modern novels, "Bright Lights, Big City"

I moved to New York because I was sick with ambition, parched by desire. Dressed in a tuxedo with my hair slicked back, I imagined myself walking down an aisle, up a few stairs, and onto the stage. I’d shake the hand of a pedophile, he’d give me a big wink, and I’d make a speech to which a crowd of fools would cheer. Then the old man would pat me on the back and send me through to the green room where he’d been before, countless times. There a dozen women lay, all dressed in white, there would be champagne fizzing in glasses, wine by the case. All of them would be beautiful to the point of petrification—most men would be afraid to even imagine them naked—but me? I’d sleep with them all in time.

Still I remember how the city looked for the first time from across the river. I was close enough to map its contours; it all looked stable enough. Only my cells rattled and roared. Yet just one hour after the move I realized that I’d locked myself into a highly expensive and electrifying asylum. The drain had suddenly opened; the stagnant water in which I’d stood became a whirlpool. Suffering from a want of money, a prefrontal cortex still mushy, a life with too much time and no real responsibility, I rejoiced in spinning around the water. The only times I ever screeched was when I slammed into walls slippery with temptation.

My college friends and I talked about our world all the time, not the constellation of my dreams but the fine-enough reality that we settled for. Lots of booze and parties, good-looking women and unruly performances. Our conversations were always more or less the same. We talked about how we’d shoved aside everyone in-line on Thursday, how we’d ripped it from the bone on Friday, how we’d gnawed and gnawed on Saturday. On Sunday we’d find each other where we hid; on Mondays we’d wipe the grease from our mouths; on Tuesdays all we talked about was how much we hated it all.

The cycle would repeat, the heads would nod, the voices would clamber… yet there remained the feeling that there was more to say in more careful language, that our shared experiences needed to be stamped into time more permanently. Of course this is the task that supports the writer’s vocation, and it is the reader’s job to look his work over later, alone, to decide whether what is before him lines up or goes astray.

Forty years ago, New York lauded Bright Lights, Big City as its generational novel, a stature that remains intact today. The book rose to the challenge of capturing the city through the lens of an ambitious twenty-four year-old who is crushed and lifted, in the same breath, by Manhattan’s stress and splendor.

The decision of the author, Jay McInerney, to use the second-person singular—you—increases the pace of an already racing novel. Early on the rider fears that the wheels are going to fall off, but he is able to continue the trick through the next two-hundred-forty pages. The effect of the language and the familiar scenes gives a certain type of New Yorker the sensation that he has been exactly there before. Perhaps one hundred years on—if Zuck succeeds in compressing us into his headsets—it will transport posterity to a universe lost.

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then again, it might not. A small voice inside you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is a result of too much of that already. The night has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where two A.M. changes to six A.M. You know this moment has come and gone, but you are not yet willing to concede that you have crossed the line beyond which all is gratuitous damage and the palsy of unraveled nerve endings.

There have been many books set in The Big Apple, but McInerney boldly crosses into what was then desolate terrain. Predating American Psycho, written by Bret Ellis—an old running pal of McInerney’s—Bright Lights, Big City shines a new light on the turbulent party scene as well as the drug that formed the crumbling cornerstone of the eighties. Despite the fact that in 1980, the period the novel is set, there were nearly two thousand homicides recorded in New York (compared to two hundred ninety-five in 2018), the themes that it highlights and the places it takes us gives it staying power in the present day. For the most part we visit parts gentrified (i.e. nightclubs, fashion parties, work cubicles, etc) and only pass squalor when a prostitute pulls up a skirt or a man sells a ferret on the street, sights familiar to New Yorkers today.

Though the environment feels less grungy than what most of the city’s denizens experienced back then, every scene of the book is rife with conflict. Rarely is there violence, much more common are encounters with qualms that continue to plague the modern man in his comfortability. There are battles in the workplace between employee and boss:

Your boss, Clara Tillinghast, somewhat resembles a fourth-grade tyrant, one of those ageless disciplinarians who believes that little boys are evil and little girls frivolous, that an idle mind is the devil’s playground and that learning is the pounding of facts, like so many nails, into the knotty oak of recalcitrant heads. Ms. Clara Tillinghast, aka Clingfast, aka The Clinger, runs the Department of Factual Verification like a spelling class, and lately you have not accumulated many gold stars. You are hanging on by the skin of your chipped teeth.

There are battles on dance floors and in the back of bars as the narrator pines after women that recurrently reject him:

Just outside the door you spot her: tall, dark and alone, half hidden behind a pillar at the edge of the dance floor. You approach laterally, moving your stuff like a Bad Spade through the slalom of a synthesized conga rhythm. She jumps when you touch her shoulder. “Dance?” She looks at you as if you had just suggested instrumental rape. “I do not speak English,” she says, when you ask again. “Français?” She shakes her head. Why is she looking at you that way, as if tarantulas were nesting in your eye sockets? “You are by any chance from Bolivia? Or Peru?” She is looking around for help now. Remembering a recent encounter with a young heiress’s bodyguard at Danceteria—or was it the Red Parrot?—you back off, hands raised over your head.

But the central discord of the book arises from the divide between how the protagonist wants to be and how he really is. New York widens this schism through its ubiquitous and painfully accessible temptations, all of which feed on a lack of direction and will. Routinely the narrator makes short-term decisions misaligned with his more wholesome self-identification: Fact-checking weighs down his dream of fiction-writing; then the intercom rings and drinking dissolves the rest of it.

Always at the buzzer is a hedonist, Tad Allagash, a character I have met on countless occasions. The type to “never ask[] you how you are and [] never wait[] for you to answer his questions,” Allagash acts in faithful accordance with his own principles. When others are tired, he alone beats the city’s drum by pulling peers out of bed to join his endless march. Soon the unnamed protagonist is swept away in the wild fantasy of his eyes, hoping that the promises he makes will come true:

How did you get here? It was your friend, Tad Allagash, who powered you in here, and he has disappeared. Tad is the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. He is either your best self or your worst self, you’re not sure which… Tad’s mission in life is to have more fun than anyone else in New York City, and this involves a lot of moving around, since there is always the likelihood that where you aren’t is more fun than where you are. You are awed by his strict refusal to acknowledge any goal higher than the pursuit of pleasure. You want to be like that. You also think it is shallow and dangerous.

If the protagonist’s goal is a tranquil happiness free from the trappings of the town, Allagash can be thought of as one of the book’s few villains. He is neither malevolent nor immoral but wholly selfish; he goes through the world without a care for another’s intentions. I am reminded of Stiva, Tolstoy’s most diabolical character in Anna Karenina, whose malignancy oozes out of a charming amorality. He reminds the reader how common it is to fall in and stay with various friend groups unconsciously, tethered to them only by momentum, despite their insidious effects. McInerney points this out through his own weakness: his decisions are as natural a consequence of his environment as starvation is in another.

The book is filled with many characters as relatable as him. There is Megan, the sweet friend who strokes your hair, who shows you endless sympathy, who has her wishes perennially relegated to an invisible dimension. There is Amanda, the girl that got away, who has moved on and forgotten you completely while you humiliate yourself trying to force her return. There is Vicky, the girl you fall for anew, the one who you can really talk to, the one you don’t try to take home because there should be no ruinous end to one happy evening. And then there is the brother and father who worry about you, the lovely mother at the center of your escapism, the family that reminds you of how much your hangover stings, how pitiful you are in that state, how much vigor and potential one man can squander in one year.

That is why, for certain people, the book feels like it is all about you. The relatability is uncanny, McInerney passes The Friendship Theory of Fiction test with flying colors. When you are reading the novel, you feel someone has simply taken a few liberties with your lived experiences. And when you finish it, you start looking back at the desires that filled the sails that carried you into the city. You can’t help but ask yourself: How badly you want to become that which you proclaim? Are you willing to put in the effort? What about all of your other ambitions? What decision do you make when they at odds with each other?

More than all else Bright Lights, Big City is a wake-up call. Whether you are twenty, thirty, forty, or more, the book invites you to pause the city that never stops, like that great scene in The Worst Person in the World. For a minute or an hour or a day, it finally makes you contemplate the question you’ve been putting off since you arrived: In a city with everything, what is it that you really want?

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