Our book choice for April 2011 is Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney. It is written about a character’s time spent caught up in, and notably escaping from, the mid-1980s New York City fast lane. It is one of the few well-known English-language novels written in the second person and its main character is unnamed. 
He is a writer who, by day, works as a fact checker for a high-brow magazine — likely based on Harpers or The New Yorker, where McInerney himself once worked as a fact checker — for which he had once hoped to write. By night, he is a party-goer, a cocaine user, seeking to lose himself in the hedonism of the 1980s yuppie party scene, often going to the nightclub Heartbreak. His wife, Amanda, recently left him and he copes with this by pretending nothing happened and telling no one that she’s gone. Initially hopeful that she will return someday, he eventually resorts to searching for her at a fashion event. He obsesses over every item she owned in his apartment, every modeling photo and every club she visited, even repeatedly visiting a mannequin based on her. Also, his partying is affecting his work and he appears to be on the verge of getting fired by his temperamental boss.
Discussion Questions
- What did you make of the style in which it is written (2nd person narrative)? Are you bothered by the fact you never know the character’s name?
- Is the protagonist a sympathetic character?
- What do you make of the ending and the episode with his mother?
- Is the book funny?
- What did you make of Tad Allagash?
- Is it a book that defines 1980s New York and the hedonistic, yuppie scene it describes?
- What role does the protagonist’s brother play in the book?
- Is the book strong enough to work as a parable about other periods in New York’s (or London’s, or any big city’s) history?
- Did McInerney’s style remind you of any other authors?
- Would you recommend this book? To whom? And would you read more by the same author?
Individual Ratings
DKB Rating 
