Saturday, December 11, 2010

Book 42 - Bright Lights, Big City - Jay McIerney

I'm a little backed up on the reviews. I finished reading this earlier in the week, and I finished reading another today, which I will try to write up before the weekend is done. Still, I've got a long way to go to meet my deadline, and a very short time in which to do it.

Book 42 - Bright Lights, Big City - Jay McIerney

Like Fight Club, which I reviewed very recently, this is another story of a man caught up in a self-destructive spiral, except this time it is not violence and mayhem, but rather drugs and debauchery that feeds this decline. The story is set in the 80s in New York City, and the main character - to be honest, I'm not sure if his name is mentioned - is a fact-checker at a big New York magazine. His fashion model wife has left him, and rather than go home to an apartment full of reminders of what he has lost, he has taken to nightly benders with his friend Tad Allagash. Tad is an insatiable womanizer, clubber, and cocaine user, and he drags our protagonist from club to club, always looking for a place where there might be more action or a better party.

As you can imagine, these self-destructive sprees are taking their toll on his professional life. He stops caring about his work. He comes in late, leaves early, sneaks naps, takes long drinking lunches in the middle of the day, and makes mistakes in his work - a very bad thing for a fact-checker. His lack of sleep and prodigious drug use combine to feed his obsession with his ex-wife, and when he learns that she is back in New York, he makes a desperate but failed attempt to contact her. Also for reasons we don't initially understand fully, he is ducking calls from his brother, who does not yet know that his wife has left him. It is not until his brother finally catches up to him that we understand the full depth of his pain.

I liked the book. Maybe it's because I would have been about the same age as the protagonist at the time it was set. There is also something interesting in the narrative voice of the novel. It is written entirely in second person. For example, the opening lines of the book are:

"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."

This, to me, heightened the feeling of being inside the protagonist's head, while at the same time emphasizing the emotional detachment that the character is feeling.

So go ahead and check it out. I never got around to watching the movie, which starred Michael J. Fox as the lead and Kiefer Sutherland playing the role of Tad. McInerney wrote the screenplay for it though, and I've been told that it's reasonably faithful to the book, so if you don't want to invest the time in reading, but the story still sounds interesting, it might be worth checking it out.

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