by Jay McInerney
“It seems to be your duty to go through the motions. You keep thinking that with practice you will eventually get the knack of enjoying superficial encounters, that you will stop looking for the universal solvent, stop grieving. You will learn to compound happiness out of small increments of mindles...
Recently I tried a book given to me by a friend that didn't click for me. My friend said, I guess this was your Bright Lights, Big City--a book I recommended to her. Humor is a funny, very individual thing, and this is one of my favorite books, while my friend hated it and abandoned it mid-read. It ...
Probably not wildly overrated (which is where I shelved it) but very much of its time. The second person conceit gets very wearing and there's more than a hint of autobiography about it, which ended up making me feel very impatient with both the author and his nameless protagonist as the latter brin...
Read this for the second time and it got better the second time around. What was life like in 80s New York, in a fashionable publishing house, for a self-destructive guy not too far out of college? I just love the writing on this one. A keeper.
perhaps the best things i can say about this one are that it perfectly captured a perfectly nauseating time period in the mid-80s and it certainly reinvigorated the use of second-person narrative with surprising elan; perhaps the worst thing i could say about this one is that It Drove Me Up The Wall...
You're moving fast. Faster than anybody else - maybe because of the Bolivian Marching Powder you just took up your nose, maybe because you don't know any other way to be. Are you living in 1980s New York... or 2010s New York? McInerney's book is still relevant, even though the scenery has changed...
Read in high school as the 80s were winding to a close, or perhaps the 90s were just beginning, although I'd argue that 90-91 (my final year of HS) was just the decade's death throes before grunge and Generation X rose from its ashes. I don't remember much about the book that I can separate in my mi...
Memorable to me now only because of the use of second person and the Spy magazine plot device.
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