In Bright Lights, Big City the 2nd person narrator works for a New York magazine as a fact-checker although his employment seems precarious; his girlfriend is a model who has vanished off to Paris and he is afraid she has left him. In this novel, the 1st person narrator works for a New York magazine as a writer although his employment seems precarious; his girlfriend is a model who has vanished off to Paris and he is afraid she has left him. So there was a distinct sense of deja vu.
The 'gimmick' this time is that the story is broken up into small sections, some no longer than a paragraph though most manage more than a page, as if the novel is in the style of a magazine article.
I found this rather tedious at first. I forgave him because he can write wonderfully wise-cracking descriptions (see the selected quotes). And because of one brilliant scene in which the narrator's mum and dad take him and his depressed sister to a meal at a posh restaurant and the conversation unwinds into a hilarious show-down.
The ending is pretty clever too.
Selected quotes:
- “Phil calls Brooke the scrambled egg head.” (Immediate family)
- “Watching the other men. Sorry bastards. ... And I am one of them. Sitting at our tables naked with yearning, inappropriately dressed for the party. We are penises trussed up in wool suits and silk ties.” (Mount Olympus) He is in the audience at a lap-dancing club.
- “There are exactly two kinds of movie star, the Solipsist and the Seducer: one speaks only of himself, not believing in the existence of anyone else; the other still seems not to believe in his or her own existence at all, and has to seek constant verification from every possible fan in the room, working it like a politician, looking into the great round mirrors of our eyes, trying to seduce us all one at a time.” (Connor among the plutocrats)
- “As a straight male I am viewed as the urban equivalent of the village idiot - harmless, perhaps, but kind of a communal embarrassment.” (How I got my job)
- “Somewhere between the middle and the end is always the best part, but we never know exactly where it is until it's over.” (The first time)
- “Within the year we moved to New York - which is to monogamy what the channel changer is to linear narrative.” (Tokyo, autumn 1993)
- “I've always found the minute portraiture of nineteenth century fiction fairly useless. For me, those precise descriptions of the hero's nose/ mouth/ eyes/ moles/ forehead never come together as an actual face ... they always end up jumbled, like a portrait in the analytic cubist mode.” (Physical appearance)
- “You know I don't like drugs that make me feel stupid. I feel stupid enough to begin with.” (Psychopharmacology)
- “I didn't want other guys to fuck her, honest. I just wanted other guys to want to fuck her.” (The Silk route)
- “Sent the cleaning lady away last week ... because I was embarrassed even for her to see the wreckage, with the result that it has grown and compounded itself as rapidly as the interest on an unpaid VISA balance.” (House call)
- “It should be counted to Jeremy's credit that he is generally unaware of the interest he excites in the opposite sex, though an ill-wisher might chalk up this obliviousness to self-absorption.” (Another literary mystery solved.)
- “Not the limelight, exactly. More like the lemonlight, the reflected
glory experienced by one-day sensations and the sexual partners of the stars.” (Connor faces the Press)
February 2026; 230 pages
First published in 1998
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