Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney’s debut novel, was published in 1984 and thus celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year. If you are under sixty years of age, this probably doesn’t mean much to you. McInerney was the first breakout star of his literary generation, and one of the most prominent members of the so-called “literary brat pack,” which took its name from a group of young actors – Emilio Estevez, Andrew McCarthy, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, etc. – who were becoming big in the film world at the same time that McInerney and his cohort – which included Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz, Susan Minot, Donna Tartt, and a handful of others – were becoming big in the publishing world. The name “brat pack” was a playful reference to the “rat pack,” a collection of old school Hollywood celebrities who liked to hang out together, drink, chase women, and generally be seen in various high-end venues in New York, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. Members of the group included Humphrey Bogart, Frank Sinatra, Joey Bishop, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and a handful of other others.
But let’s get back to Jay McInerney, because he’s the star of this particular piece. McInerney was born in 1955, into a fairly well off family. He graduated from Williams College in 1976 and got an MFA from Syracuse University, where he studied under Raymond Carver. If it sounds as if I pilfered that info from Wikipedia, it’s because I did. McInerney’s background has been written about ad nauseam in countless venues and if you want more details than I’ve given you, just Google him (or wait a bit, because there’s more of it below).
Literary fiction was in the doldrums in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This situation is fascinatingly documented in a recent book called Big Fiction, written by Dan Sinykin. His book quotes Gary Fisketjon, a legendary Random House editor, telling an interviewer that, “when I came into the business in the late 70s, [literary writers] couldn’t even get published because they sold so poorly in hardcover and they never went into paperback. There was a backlog of very good writers who were wildly under-published for a period of years. It was a good time for a kid to come into it because you had a lot accomplished writers to choose from.”
Sinykin also quotes a Publishers Weekly report that noted, “First novels and books by authors without a large readership were bought by hardback publishers for low (four-figure) advances, low print runs were set, and virtually no promotion or publicity, beyond reviews, was planned.” Thus, observes Sinykin, “You had writers like Richard Ford and Cormac McCarthy selling only a few thousand copies in hardcover, not doing paperback, and going out of print.”
Fisketjon was a college classmate of Jay McInerney’s at Williams. In the early 1980s, when McInerney was earning an advanced degree at Syracuse, he would spend his summer breaks at Fisketjon’s loft apartment in the east village. It was there that McInerney began writing BLBC. Very soon after joining Random House, Fisketjon made a name for himself at by creating the Vintage Contemporaries series of trade paperback books. Trade paperbacks are larger and more costly than mass-market (or pocket) paperbacks, but they are less expensive than hardback books. Vintage Contemporaries had a very distinctive cover layout that made them attractive to the kind of people who like to collect book series. Prior to the advent of Vintage Contemporaries, most book snobs wouldn’t have bothered collecting a paperback series. They preferred leather-bound hardback classics. But Vintage Contemporaries changed all that. Fisketjon’s original idea was to republish the best works of a lot of established but under-appreciated literary authors in his Vintage Contemporaries series, along with a select handful of original novels by newer writers and hope that their association with established literary stars would help those young writers find an audience. In the event, the exact opposite happened. The first four books in the VC series were Bright Lights, Big City, written by McInerney, and three older titles – one each from Raymond Carver, Thomas McGuane, and Peter Matthiessen – brought back into print after having underperformed in hardback. McInerney at first resisted the idea of publishing BLBC as a paperback original. Back then, “paperback original” was essentially synonymous with “commercial hack work.” But Fisketjon convinced him that appearing in the same strikingly original-looking series of trade paperbacks as Carver and company would allow him to ride the coattails of their reputations. But, as it turned out, it was McInerney who had the long coattails. The media became fascinated by the notion of a new generation of young writers breaking into print not, as Hemingway and Fitzgerald had, with stately hardback books published in the old-fashioned way, but in low-cost trade paperbacks with a hip and edgy look to them. As Sinykin writes, “Bright Lights, Big City was a smash. In a reversal, it was MacInerney who gave Carver, McGuane and Matthiessen a boost. The debut went through fourteen printings and sold more than two hundred thousand copies in the first eighteen months. Now everyone wanted a trade paperback series.” Penguin quickly invented its own Contemporary American Fiction series, and its first paperback original was David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System. Nowadays, the late DFW seems to have a higher reputation than McInerney, but it was McInerney who helped pave the way not only for Wallace but for all of the brat packers who would ride the paperback original gravy train to commercial success.
But that was long ago. The intervening forty years have not been especially kind to either McInerney or Bright Lights, Big City. By now, the conventional wisdom surrounding McInerney’s career has hardened into a truism. Most people in the literary world familiar with his work will tell you that, after a very promising debut novel, McInerney allowed himself to get caught up in the worlds of celebrity and high society that he mocked in his work. As a result, after Bright Lights, Big City, his literary career became a classic case of diminishing returns. His debut novel drew comparisons to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and many people were expecting big things from McInerney, no doubt hoping that he could go on to do for the Reagan Era what Fitzgerald had done for the Jazz Age – immortalize some of the New Yorkers who embodied its restless, materialistic essence. Of course, in short order, a lot of older critics got all Lloyd Bentsen on McInerney, proclaiming, in essence, “You, sir, are no F. Scott Fitzgerald!” In May of 1992, Adam Begley published a snotty profile of McInerney in the Los Angeles Times. The headline read, “Little Jay: Happy at Last: The Rake of Lower Manhattan Has a New Wife (No. 3), a New Book (No. 4) and a New Home (Very Far South of SoHo).” Here’s the money quote:
“Last year, in the New York Review of Books (home to many a stalwart culture guardian), he published a substantial, keenly observed essay on the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. McInerney likes to encourage comparisons between his career and Fitzgerald’s. It’s a bad idea, mainly because Fitzgerald’s best writing is clearly great writing--not a distinction one could claim for the author of ‘Bright Lights,’ no matter how many copies the book sells. McInerney knows that he hasn’t written anything on a par with ‘Gatsby,’ yet he can’t help identifying with this early exemplar of the author as celebrity.”
Begley is a conventional-minded journalist with an elite background (Harvard, Stanford, son of a Harvard-educated lawyer/novelist), so you can’t expect him to question the greatness of any book listed in Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon. I’m not as impressed by pedigree as Begley is, and I’m happy to play the unlettered buffoon and announce that, as a matter of fact, Bright Lights, Big City is a much better book than The Great Gatsby (or The Catcher in the Rye, or As I Lay Dying, or many another classic American novel). Earlier this year, the editors of the Washington Post’s Book Club asked their readers, “Which classic novels are overrated?” The Catcher in the Rye was the overwhelming choice of the Post’s readers. But Gatsby was a solid second-place finisher. Here’s what Daniel McMahon, a WaPo Book Club member said of Fitzgerald’s “masterpiece”:
“Humorless, joyless, and intellectually pedestrian, this novel is not just overrated – it’s not good. It is the Emperor’s New Clothes of novels that ‘beats on’ because it is so endlessly assigned and students are told it is a classic. I suppose if one has read only 10 novels in one’s life (or high school career) that it might seem to be the best of those.”
For me, the dumbest thing about Fitzgerald’s book is its portrait of working-class America as a blighted ash heap overseen by the empty spectacles of a god in ruin. Clearly, F. Scott never spent much time with Middle Americans, who are generally much more fun to hang around with than Ivy Leaguers. Fitzgerald wrote some excellent short stories (mostly set in Europe or Hollywood or New York City), but he wasn’t much of a novelist. Gatsby appeals to teachers of American lit because it is short and full of heavy-handed symbolism. I am sympathetic to the plight of America’s high school teachers. I don’t blame them for assigning relatively short and easy-to-read books like Catcher and Gatsby to their students. Most students are never likely to make it through anything longer or more difficult than those books. But just because Catcher and Gatsby remain on many a high school reading list does not make them great books. It makes them books that are easy to teach. I wouldn’t rate BLBC an all-time masterpiece of world literature, but it seems to capture the denizens of its rarefied milieu (young, upwardly mobile, elite-educated New York professionals) with humor and sympathy and a complete lack of sentimentality. I say “seems” because I have never actually visited that milieu in real life, so I don’t really know how its denizens behave. But BLBC felt authentic to me when I read it in the mid 1980s. And, when I re-read it recently, it felt not just authentic but positively prophetic.
The term Yuppie (slang for young, upwardly-mobile, urban professional) first appeared in print in 1980. It was used frequently by journalists in the years that followed. But McInerney seems to have been the first novelist to have actually succeeded in capturing what exactly a yuppie was. His unnamed second-person narrator (he refers to himself as “you” rather than “I”) is a graduate of an elite college, works at the New Yorker (though it is never named) as a fact checker, and aspires to be a fiction writer although, by novel’s end, it seems far more likely that he’ll end up going back to college for a law degree or taking a job on Wall Street. His leading characteristic is that he has had a world of privilege laid at his feet but spends much of his time pissing it all away on cocaine, alcohol, and impersonal sex. For most non-privileged Americans, throwing away an opportunity like this would probably prove fatal. They would never get a chance to win it back. But BLBC makes it pretty clear that, if you go to the right schools and make the right social connections, you pretty much can’t fail. McInerney’s narrator does almost nothing but fuck up throughout the novel, and yet, at the end, we’re left with the impression that he will eventually get his shit together and become a wealthy professional, marry another highly educated professional, and live in some high-end Connecticut suburb of New York City. Even his boss at the New Yorker, where he was an utter failure and became only the second person ever fired, promises to write him a glowing letter of recommendation. Had McInerney’s narrator been a young black man from an impoverished family and possessed of only a community college diploma, his voracious appetite for cocaine would probably have led to him being incarcerated for the rest of his youth. And by the time he was done paying for that mistake, it would likely be too late for him to attain even a decent middle-class life, much less a wealthy Connecticut one.
To some extent, we have always lived in that world, a world where the rich and well-bred are afforded endless “second” chances. But in previous generations, this was more or less a matter of being born into it. What McInerney understood, and what he illustrated in BLBC, was that the new meritocracy wasn’t likely to be any better than the old aristocracy it was replacing. McInerney’s narrator doesn’t come from a rich or noteworthy family. His parents have just enough privilege to win an elite education for their offspring. But, in the America that sprang from the Reagan era, an elite education, and the connections to be made from it, proved to be a new form of safety net, the kind that allowed the privileged to screw around and fail over and over again and still not go completely bust. In the days when both America and Great Britain had aristocracies of a sort, family failures – black sheep, if you will, -- often became remittance men. Their families sent them off to some faraway place and wired them a monthly stipend just so long as they never returned to the family home. This allowed cads to escape all sorts of misbehavior – impregnating the family’s maid, embezzling from their firms, killing someone in a drunken driving accident – but at least it meted out some sort of punishment. Exile to a far corner of the British empire may not have been pleasant for these cads but it was likely much more pleasant than prison would have been. But, in America, in the 1980s, the privileged classes no longer bothered attaching any shame to misbehavior. They just handed Get Out of Jail Free cards to anyone with the proper credentials. And that’s why, at the end of BLBC, though the narrator has screwed up over and over again, broken dozens of laws and created hardship for everyone in his orbit, the reader feels confident that he will end up wealthy and, by conventional standards, successful.
The past four decades have brought us any number of examples of the type of elite idiots that McInerney describes in his book – screw ups who continue to fail upwards. When rereading the book recently, I realized that McInerney was describing the world that would soon give us the likes of Hunter Biden, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Paris Hilton, William Kennedy Smith, and countless others who have contributed almost nothing good to society but have nonetheless never been allowed to wind up penniless and ashamed. These people would have been remittance men (or women) in a previous era. Nowadays they just keep failing upwards.
To an old man like me (born three years after McInerney), BLBC still seems like a relatively recent book. But, as I reread it, I realized that the America described in its pages is much closer in spirit to the America of the 1950s than to the America of the smart phone era. When the narrator’s fashion model wife runs away to Paris, he tells us, in his second-person narrative voice, “After three days of transatlantic telexes and calls you located her in a hotel on the left bank.” Later, the narrator finds a note from his friend Tad slipped under his apartment door. It begins, “Having this messengered to your digs after numerous calls to reputed place of employ.” Nowadays, most of us can communicate instantly, at any time, with the people who are closest to us. We don’t have to send telexes or have handwritten letters carried to an apartment by a bicycle messenger. Even if my wife were in Zaire, I could communicate with her instantly from my home in Sacramento. BLBC now seems kind of quaint.
What’s more, there are lines in Bright Lights, Big City that would make no sense to most Americans too young to remember, say, cigarette advertisements. At one point, the narrator says of his co-workers, “They are not convinced that you’d rather switch than fight.” Unless you are familiar with the old Tareyton Cigarette slogan, “Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch!” McInerney’s line makes little sense.
But it often seems as if McInerney was able to see into the future as he was writing BLBC. There are several references to the twin towers of the World Trade Center. In fact, the final three-page section of the novel begins, “The first light of the morning outlines the towers of the World Trade Center at the tip of the island.” This is pretty much the final exterior “shot” of the novel and it’s delivered in a sort of elegiac manner.
Elsewhere in the novel, at a dance club, McInerney’s narrator notes that, “Elaine moves with an angular syncopation that puts you in mind of the figures on Egyptian tombs. It may be a major new dance step.” The book was published in 1984. Two years later the Bangles would reach the top of the American pop chart with a song called “Walk Like an Egyptian,” which kicked off a craze for dancing in a manner that mimicked the figures on Egyptian tombs.
At the New Yorker, the narrator works in the Department of Factual Verification. This allows McInerney an opportunity to occasionally muse on the difference between facts and truths. When his boss tells him fact-checking is important because, “Our readers depend on us for the truth,” the narrator writes, “You would like to say, ‘Whoa! Block that jump from facts to truth,’ but she is off and running.” Twice he quotes the Talking Heads song “Crosseyed and Painless”: “Facts all come with points of view/Facts won’t do what I want them to.” Nowadays, many in the media seem more obsessed with facts than they are with truth. In the early days of the pandemic, when there were only enough face masks available for medical professionals, the media told us that face masks were not necessary for the general public. Later they altered that “fact.” At this point, it’s difficult to remember what the truth really was.
One fact that McInerney seemed to see coming was the media’s determination to write him off as a one-book wonder. Early in the book, the narrator says to himself, “You could start your own group – the Brotherhood of Unfulfilled Early Promise.” Later, he writes, “But what you are left with is a premonition of the way your life will fade behind you, like a book you have read too quickly, leaving a dwindling trail of images and emotions, until all you can remember is a name.” It almost seems as if he was trying to beat his critics to the punch by declaring himself a cautionary tale about the wages of early promise before they could do it. Certainly, none of his later books would have anywhere near the kind of cultural prominence attained by Bright Lights, Big City, but that was mostly just because the media had moved on to other literary wunderkinds. When Nathan Englander published his story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges in 1999, the media proclaimed him the second coming of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth all rolled into one. But his post-wunderkind career has been far less impressive than McInerney’s. Now he’s a middle-aged, mid-list writer and academic. To one extent or another the same has been true of most of McInerney’s fellow brat packers. Tama Janowitz never caught fire. David Leavitt and Ethan Canin have had fairly unspectacular careers. Likewise Susan Minot and Mona Simpson and any number of other writers who came out of elite writing programs in the 1980s. In the 32 years since the publication of The Secret History, her debut novel, Donna Tartt has managed to produce just two more novels. One of those won a Pulitzer, but I’m damned if I can tell you why. Only Lorrie Moore (born on McInerney’s second birthday) seems to have carved out a reputation as a Serious American Literary Author. Of all the brat packers, she is the one most likely to end up enshrined in the Library of America. Her short stories will probably someday be as highly thought of as Alice Munro’s (let’s hope she doesn’t have any skeletons in her closet to rival Alice’s). Barbara Kingsolver (born three months after McInerney) and Ann Patchett (born three months before Bret Easton Ellis) were born in the right era, but their fiction debuted just a bit too late for them to qualify as true literary brat packers. (For what it’s worth, I believe posterity will show that the best American writers born in the 1950s were almost all genre writers, such as Michael Connelly and Patricia Cornwell).
I continued reading McInerney’s work well into the 1990s. I thought 1988’s Story of My Life was nearly as good as BLBC. I went into Brightness Falls with a chip on my shoulder because, prior to reading that novel, I read an interview with McInerney in which he said he was inspired to write the book after asking himself, “What would Bonfire of the Vanities have been like if it was populated with real people rather than caricatures?” (or words to that effect). I was a huge fan of Bonfire and found the characters at least as convincing as any of McInerney’s. Nonetheless, I read and enjoyed Brightness Falls. I also enjoyed his 1997 novel The Last of the Savages. I almost didn’t read it because of a review in the Atlantic Monthly that practically accused McInerney of having plagiarized Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. The review was titled “Robert Penn McInerney.” How’s that for subtlety? McInerney wrote a wounded response to the magazine, claiming he’d never even read All the King’s Men. The review had been so inflammatory that the editor of the Atlantic took the unusual step of hiring another writer (I seem to recall it was Charles d’Ambrosio, but I can’t find it online) to read both The Last of the Savages and All the King’s Men and see if the charge of near-plagiarism was warranted. Charles d’Ambrosio (or whoever) sided with McInerney.
Alas, after the Last of the Savages, I didn’t read any more of his novels. I did read his story collection, How It Ended, and enjoyed it. I am hoping soon to read or reread my way through his entire oeuvre and then weigh in on it here. Having reread Bright Lights, Big City, I can say that I think it is nearly the equal of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, another short novel about being young and broke in New York City. I also found myself wishing that McInerney had written a sequel to it. And then, completely by chance, I read a novel – The Big Picture by Douglas Kennedy – that very easily could have been a sequel to BLBC. I’m not kidding, it was the very next novel I picked up after finishing BLBC.
Both Kennedy and McInerney were born in January of 1955 (Kennedy on New Year’s Day and McInerney on the thirteenth). Their fathers were both Irish-American Catholics. Both writers attended Ivy-adjacent universities (Bowdoin for Kennedy; Williams for McInerney). In the late 1970s and early 1980s Kennedy lived for a few years in Ireland. McInerney lived in Japan from 1977 to 1979. According to his Wikipedia bio, Kennedy’s primary job was running a theater company until, in the mid 1980s, he decided to become a novelist. That would have been almost exactly the time when the literary brat pack started to make waves. Kennedy may well have been inspired by McInerney’s success to seek a writing career of his own. In any case, Kennedy published his first novel (more of a novella, actually, at 208 pages) in 1994. It didn’t seem to drum up a lot of interest, which may be why his second novel, 1997’s The Big Picture, was promoted as a debut novel (both Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly referred to it as such). The Big Picture is an excellent thriller. But it also feels like an extension of the story McInerney told in BLBC. Mind you, I’m not accusing Kennedy of stealing anything. As noted, BLBC tells the story of a young man, with an elite education, who lives and works in New York City. He married a woman named Amanda, but after her career as a fashion model began to flourish, she left him. He works as a fact checker at a prestigious unnamed magazine. He allows his close friend Tad Allagash to coax him into partying his blues away by going out night after night and getting drunk and coked up in various trendy New York clubs. By the end of the novel, we learn that the narrator’s feeling of emptiness stems not so much from the departure of his wife but from the death, from cancer, of his mother, which took place a year before the book begins. In fact, he seems to have proposed to his wife primarily to make his mother happy. Her death has left him unmoored. Once he realizes this, he seems, at novel’s end, to be on the road to getting his shit together. Tad Allagash has introduced him to his cousin Vicky, who, unlike Tad, appears to be a responsible and highly intelligent person. The reader is left to imagine that the narrator and Vicky will soon become romantically involved and, eventually, marry and become a boring yuppie power couple. At the time the book was published, this seemed like a reasonable assumption. But, because many of the biographical details of BLBC corresponded with McInerney’s own bio (he was, for instance, a fact-checker at the New Yorker), anyone who read the book after about 1995 or so probably figured that the narrator, like McInerney, would end up making somewhat of a hash of his personal life. McInerney is currently on his fourth marriage, and has also had relatively long-term relationships with Rielle Hunter (who later became famous as the mistress of presidential candidate John Edwards) and model Marla Hanson (his first wife was model Linda Rossiter; his current wife is the sister of Patty Hearst and the aunt of model Lydia Hearst; he seems to have a thing for models and wealthy socialites, and more power to him).
Anywho, it is easy to imagine that the narrator of BLBC and Vicky Allagash got married sometime in the late 1980s, moved to Connecticut, and had a couple of children together. It’s also easy to imagine that, after failing as a fiction writer, the narrator went back to college to get a law degree and is now commuting daily to New York City where he works for a prestigious law firm. And it’s also easy to imagine that, by the mid 1990s, both the marriage and the legal career had begun to pall. After all, this was a guy who dreamed of being the next F. Scott Fitzgerald and now he spends his days writing wills for rich people.
That is pretty much the set-up of The Big Picture. (Major spoilers ahead!) The main character (he narrates in the first person, however, not the second) is Ben Bradford. He once dreamed of being a photographer in the mode of Richard Avedon. But, after college, he allowed his father to talk him into getting a law degree, just in case his artistic ambitions didn’t pan out (the narrator of BLBC makes a lot of his life decisions based on what he thinks will please his father). So here he is, living in the suburbs with a son who is about five and another who is only about six months old. His wife, Beth, who, like the narrator of BLBC, once dreamed of being a novelist, is now trapped at home with two children. She is miserable and resents her husband for steering her away from her literary ambitions. She wrote three novels and had a good literary agent shop them around but couldn’t find a publisher for any of the books, probably because they were all about unhappy upper-middle-class white suburban housewives who resent their husbands. Ben, like the narrator of BLBC, has begun drinking heavily and abusing (prescription) drugs.
Beth and Ben have a neighbor named Gary Summers, whom Ben loathes. Gary fashions himself a freelance photographer but rarely has any of his work published. Nonetheless, his parents left him a small trust fund when they died so Gary can spend his days indulging his fantasy of being a professional photographer. Gary and Ben are roughly the same age and have the same general build. Gradually, Ben begins to suspect that Beth and Gary are having an affair, trysting during the daylight hours when a nanny is looking after the kids and Ben is off in the City. This, naturally, infuriates Ben. One night, he goes to Gary’s house to confront him about the affair. They quarrel and, in a blind rage, Ben strikes out at Gary with a wine bottle (Gary is an annoying wine snob; sort of like Jay McInerney who now writes quite a bit about wine). The glass bottle breaks and cuts Gary’s throat. Gary bleeds out quickly. Ben, not surprisingly, freaks out. But only for a moment. Fairly quickly, he comes up with a rather ingenious plan for slipping out of both a murder charge and his failing marriage. Luckily for Ben, the killing of Garry Summers occurred shortly after Beth and Ben had fought (verbally) and Beth had taken the two boys and gone off to stay with her sister and brother-in-law. She has told Ben she wants a divorce and she wants him to spend the next week or so finding a new place to live so that she can move back into the house with the two boys. This gives Ben an opportunity to pull off a deception that has been used in hundreds of old movies (think of Bette Davis in A Stolen Life). He asks a friend if he can borrow his sailboat for a few days. He tells the friend that he thinks a couple of days out on the Atlantic ocean off the New England coast will be good for him. The friend obliges by making the boat available to him. Ben’s plan has a lot of moving parts but, essentially, he puts Gary’s body on the boat and then rigs it to blow up when it is out at sea. The explosion will look like an accident, the kind of screw-up a novice sailor like Ben, who doesn’t really know much about boats, might well initiate. Meanwhile, Ben goes about stepping into Gary’s old life. He sends out an email to all Gary’s acquaintances (he doesn’t have many) and tells them that he has a photography assignment in Baja California and is likely to be gone for awhile. No one really cares (Beth will be too devastated by the “death” of her husband to worry much about Gary’s plight). And so, Ben Bradford, the lawyer, becomes Gary Summers, the freelance photographer. He hits the highway in Gary’s MG and begins a road trip across America. He has plenty of camera equipment and, for the first time ever, he is able to pursue his passion for photography full time (thanks to the quarterly checks that show up in Gary’s bank account). Being a lawyer, Ben was able to use various legalistic ruses to gain himself access to Gary’s credit card accounts, bank accounts, etc.
This scenario seems like the kind of situation the irresponsible narrator of BLBC might find himself in if his second marriage began to pall. The Great Gatsby is a novel about reinventing yourself – well, to be more accurate, it’s a novel about how disastrous it can be to try to reinvent yourself. And Fitzgerald’s ghost seems to hover over BLBC. Meanwhile, BLBC seems to hover over The Big Picture. The Big Picture contains several references to the New Yorker, a magazine that plays a big role in BLBC. Both Ben Bradford and the narrator of BLBC seem obsessed with high-end clothes, watches, wallets, cars, etc. Both men are married to women who prefer their careers to their husbands. Both men drink to excess and abuse drugs (though Ben is nowhere near the world-class cokehead that McInerney’s narrator is; poet Peter Davison once noted that if you replaced every instance of the word “cocaine” in BLBC with the word “chocolate,” it would become a children’s book; he didn’t mean it as a compliment).
Despite all the above spoilers, I haven’t completely ruined The Big Picture for you. I’ve described only half the plot. McInerney is a product of the MFA industry and studied under Raymond Carver, a writer whose fictions tend to end ambiguously and eschew high drama and narrative fireworks. McInerney, for my money, is a better writer than Carver. BLBC is very funny and has some clever plot turns. But McInerney seemed determined not to give his novel a big Hollywood ending of any kind. The story just sort of peters out, which is a defensible artistic choice. Form follows function, and the function of BLBC is to show just how miserable and exhausting a life of nonstop partying and drug abuse truly is. Eventually, those partiers all either just peter out and move on with their lives, or else they die. Kennedy, to his credit, is not a writer in the Raymond Carver mode. If this were 1940, he’d probably be writing Bette Davis movies. He’d probably resent my saying so, because it looks as though he considers himself a serious literary man, but The Big Picture has much more in common with the novels of John Grisham than the novels of, say, John Updike, and thank god for that. Kirkus Reviews summed up The Big Picture like this: “A startlingly unoriginal story whipped up by Kennedy’s overdrive pacing and mastery of detail.” That backhanded compliment doesn’t give Kennedy enough credit. Almost every single twist you can insert into a thriller has probably been used thousands of times before. We read thrillers not so much for original plot twists but to see those plot elements recombined in new and interesting ways, in milieus that haven’t been done to death, with characters who aren’t straight out of Central Casting. For a first (sort of) novel, The Big Picture is amazingly assured and polished.
According to Wikipedia, Douglas Kennedy is the author of seventeen novels. Wikipedia also assures us that his books are bestsellers, but when I clicked on the link that proves this fact, it took me to a page that showed that The Big Picture was the seventeenth bestselling novel for the week of April 20, 1997. That’s certainly an impressive accomplishment, but it hasn’t made him a household name like King or Grisham. On Goodreads.com, his most successful novel (2001’s Pursuit of Happiness) has garnered 588 reader reviews. Again, that’s not chopped liver, but it ain’t exactly a publishing juggernaut either. Bright Lights, Big City is forty years old and still has more than 2,000 reader reviews at Goodreads. Delia Owens 2018 novel Where the Crawdads Sing has over 200,000 reader reviews. I point this out not to belittle Kennedy, but simply to show that he, like McInerney, seems to be underappreciated. Which is a shame. The Big Picture was the first Douglas Kennedy novel I’ve read, but it won’t be last.
I think both Bright Lights, Big City and The Big Picture are still very much worth reading, despite the fact that the former was published forty years ago, the latter was published 27 years ago, and neither book seems to have found itself a permanent place in the canon of serious American literature (BLBC) or crime fiction (The Big Picture). Both books have their champions, and each can be enjoyed as a standalone experience. But if you want a really mind-blowing reading experience, read them back-to-back, as I recently did. With just the tiniest bit of imagination you can easily read The Big Picture as an extension of the story that McInerney began in Bright Lights, Big City. If you could somehow go back to 1984 and combine the two stories into one grand American epic about the rise and fall and rise and fall of an ambitious American yuppie with artistic pretensions it would probably be greeted by the literary establishment as a masterpiece. Bright Lights, Big Picture – the best American novel that never was.
Kevin, thanks for the review. It was very informative and interesting. Didn't know much about the 'brat pack' writers. I was too busy reading all the greats, the old guys, Hemmingway, I never read BLBC when it came out. I was writing my own book at the time and was, maybe, likely, a little jealous of al the attention the writer was getting. I've been reading the old guys, Mailer, Bellow, Theroux... (I'm currently reading W&P, 600 pages in and hoping I can get through it as my TBR pile is growing.)
I stumbled on Canin a couple years ago and really liked Emperor of the Air. Read something by Carver, can't recall which. I liked Matthiessen's At Play in the Fields of the Lord. I also love the war writers and their work from the 60s and 70s, Vonneget and Heller.
I have a set of Fitzgerald books. Never liked Gatsby, actually, never 'got it,' whatever it was. (Thanks for your analysis of same. It's on my shelf but I doubt I'll re-read it.) Same with Catcher in the Rye, which I read in HS. I loved McCarthy's Border Trilogy. I don't want to read The Road, seems too grim.
I loved The Bonfires of the Vanities, and A Man in Full by Wolfe. Never read Douglas Kennedy. Loved Updike's Rabbit series.
Speaking of 'The canon of Serious American Literature,' does such a thing exist anymore? Seems like whatever was in there might now be in the trash bins in the alleys behind the workhouses of Big Publishing.
I see you're in Sac. I'm across the border in the Reno area. (Has California Forest Fire Setting Season started yet? I haven't see any smoke yet.)
I'll let you go now.
PS. My most recent (unpublished) book, The Fake Memoir of a Mid-List Writer, has been both long-listed and short listed, but still hasn't found a home with a publisher. (You might like it as it could compared to BLBC, but the POV character is lower middle class, a returned Vietnam vet, who meets and falls in love with a girl from the wealthy suburbs. Anyway, I'm sure it's not a great book, but I'm also sure it's a damn good one. I hope to publish it before I end up somewhere over the rainbow. Question, do you know any houses that would consider a book from a writer without an agent? AND... Do you know of anyone who reviews unpublished books (so the writer will have some kind of review before the book hits the streets?
Thanks again for an enjoyable post!