Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney, included on the 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read list, but if you ask me, it is one of the Top 100, and as a comedy, it would be in the Top 20 http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world 10 out of 10

Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney, included on the 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read list, but if you ask me, it is one of the Top 100, and as a comedy, it would be in the Top 20 http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world

10 out of 10

 

 

This is an absolutely magnificent, alert, modern, or post-modern, enticing, hilarious, thoughtful, also tragic, insightful, sophisticated, outré, dazzling, intoxicating and vivid, original, written in the second person – now when is the last time you have read about…You in a novel, you are the reader and also…the protagonist – You are twenty four, work as a fact- checker at one of the prestigious New York Magazines – we should think of The New Yorker maybe – where you had dreamed to be, only it does not work too well

 

‘Your soul is as disheveled as your apartment, and until you can clean it up a little you don’t want to invite any one inside’ and yes, some of us, the readers, will have identified with the main character very soon, if not because we read about ‘You, then as we are using the Thin Slicing Theory brilliantly explained in the quintessential psychology opus Blink, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/05/blink-power-of-thinking-without.html and see our life here

We see New York, The Big City, with Colgate signs, garbage barges going to the ocean – presumably because this is the eighties, they would not do that now in New York, even looking at the news or/and documentaries, galactic quantities of waste, plastic and so much more ends up in the oceans and the shores – graffiti, late trains, a fellow in the subway who says his birthday is January 13 and ‘somehow, he makes this sound like a threat to kill you with a blunt object and then he sits on an old lady’

 

Bright Light, Big city is fabulous and magic in the manner that it combines The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, we read about the cataclysmic and we can laugh out loud (not necessarily at the gruesome aspects) when Jay McInerney writes about what happened in the train, imagining the New York Post headline ‘OLD LADY CRUSHED WHILE WIMPS WATCH’ the horrible is present in this mesmerizing magnum opus, that is clear

‘You’, as the hero and anti-hero of the narrative, are using ‘Bolivian Marching Powder’ in vast quantities, and the reference to the Bolivian substance is frequent, this is one side of the saga that would be enough to bring down the morale, mood of the story, but it is told with incredible talent, using humor, while highlighting a problem that would lead to dire consequences for, well, You, since this is about all of us reading this stupendous, glorious novel (let me note here that this is in the read again folder, and soon, Insha’Allah) even when we have not had experience with drugs…I am still waiting to smoke my first joint, and though it is illegal here, for the moment, I am not admitting to anything, as a written confession, except for the limitations of my life experience, I read about plenty of personages getting stoned, and I still have no idea what they are talking about, not literally, as a metaphor, yes, maybe…

 

You have gems, nay, treasures on every page, such as ‘he would not accompany you below the 14^th Street because, he said, he doesn’t have a lowlife visa, the narcoleptic theater critic that has been confusing one play for another in his chronicle, ‘You are the equivalent of ‘the minor cousin in this family, that they would send to a malarial colony, sans quinine’ all with reference to classics, such as Under The Volcano http://realini.blogspot.com/2017/09/note-on-under-volcano-novel-malcolm.html by Malcolm Lowry

‘Since Your Own marital Pearl Harbor, you have understood that sleeping alone goes a long way explaining nastiness and erratic behavior’ doesn’t it sound weird, provocative and inspirational, thought provoking to read about…You, like that, there are some we have been living in marital bliss, lucky eejits, but many of us have known the dark side of this arrangement, prompted often by the Coolidge Effect http://realini.blogspot.com/2021/08/la-femme-abandonnee-from-chef-doeuvre.html or an opposite...

 

In the case of this phenomenal, hallucinating novel, Amanda is clearly responsible for ‘Your’ slide into mayhem, depression, however much we could attribute disasters to addiction, which could have been aggravated, or turned on by the separation, better said abandonment…You have met Amanda in one of those red states (Trump, or Mad Men territory most of them) and she saw immediately that You were her ticket out of Trailer Park Land, and to the Bright Lights, Big City, and once her escape is through, she becomes a model, and then she calls from Paris to tell you that she now has someone else…

The new reading of this announcement would be ‘good for Her’, she is liberated now from the oppression of the male, this is this way, and the readers should cheer her on, and blame You, the archetypal male chauvinist, dominant, patronizing, on the way out, retrograde and so on, this is not how I see it, nonetheless..

 

We can also see you as a bit of a fool, after all, you buy a genuine Cartier watch for 30 dollars (the dialogue with the peddler, the man on the street is just one of a myriad of examples of hilarious entertainment,  ‘at thirty dollars, you’re not buying, you’re stealing it’) and then a little later, at 3:15 it dies and the winding knob falls off, but this is how we identify with the hero aka You, following an Aristotelian rule on the main character, who has to be like the audience thinks they are, we also need discovery and reversal in the plot, just like Oedipus finding he has killed his father and married his mother, discovery and upset all in one…

Tad Allagash is the other splendid figure, the one who uses pranks, calls from downstairs and says it is ‘The Narcotics Squad, we are soliciting donations for children around the world who have…no drugs’ he is also the one who exposes Amanda ‘didn’t you see the sign on her forehead that said Space to Let, Short and Long Term Leasing’ – he may be the one with the way out from this debacle, and we could hope for a better outcome, without spoilers here, since there is no definite, clear cut finale, where you see them all die, or on the contrary, live happily for ever after, we could project our own idiosyncrasies, espoirs, goals here…After all, this is about You and Me, in this outstanding spectacular, ravishing, exuberant, exhilarating chef d’oeuvre http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/realini-in-newsweek-participant-in.html