BRIGHT LIGHTS BIG CITY

Bright Lights Big City



Bright Lights Big City

It's Six A.M. Do You Know Where Are? - Abandoned at a night-club by Tad, you try to salvage the evening through Bolivian Marching Powder and the company of strangers, but fail. You walk out into the harsh light of day. Bright Lights, Big City narrates a few disastrous days in the life of an aspiring young writer in the swirling, madcap world of young, upwardly mobile Manhattan in the 1980s. The book's narrator, plagued by a failed marriage and an unnamed sense of loss and guilt, watches helplessly from the distance of a cocaine-induced haze as he proceeds to squander his prestigious job and all sense of dignity and self-respect. Under the cover of an ironic sensibility, impervious to his surroundings, he plunges deeper into an abyss of nightclubs, shallow conversation, sex and drugs. The narrator opens his story in a downtown Manhattan disco, Heartbreak or Lizard Lounge, at an unspecified hour of the early morning. He addresses himself as "You" and seems bewildered to find himself in a conversation with a strange, bald and tattooed woman (McInerney, 2007).

The Department of Factual Verification - Clara makes you wait to suffer the consequences of arriving an hour and fifteen minutes late. After breif interactions with your co-workers, you attempt to edit a French piece due that night. Late into the night you give up, hand in the still mangled article, and head home. The narrator is late for work the next morning. On his way to work, he encounters a bum in the subway, roughly of his same age, who scares him with his "long-distance" eyes. On the train, he reads the New York Post, whose headlines give him an odd pleasure with their ghastly stories. He reads a poster on a light pole with the name of a missing young woman and hears a pimp advertising peep shows at Times Square. He dreads going into work and thinks of his boss, Clara Tillinghast, with apprehension, believing that she is out to get him and wants him fired. He greets Lucio, the elevator operator, and Sally the receptionist, two more exemplars of working class New Yorkers, before entering the hallowed editorial offices, covering two floors (McInerney, 2007).

The Utility Fiction - At home, you try not to think of Amanda. You contemplate spending an evening in, maybe to write or read for a little while. However Tad shows up and whisks you off into the night with two female friends, but you end up alone as before. The narrator arrives home to his apartment, where he relaxes with the mail and reflects on his true vision of himself as a sedate, bookish man at heart with little ambitions besides enjoying the creature comforts of home. However, he finds it impossible to suppress the dread he feels being home alone. The apartment is the second one he lived in with his wife, Amanda, the apartment they moved into to make room for their wedding ...