Bright Lights, Big City

Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney is the literary equivalent of a Cocteau Twins song. It's a cocaine-fueled binge through New York in the early eighties, where everyone wears sweet outfits and the women are rated on their statuesque, art-deco "cheekbones." It's hazy and decadent and fun. The protagonist--"you" in the novel's strange second-person point of view--is a fact checker at a magazine exactly like the New Yorker who parties all night to get over his wife's departure and, we later learn, other personal tragedies. Apparently there's a Michael J. Fox movie based on the novel, and I'd like to see it. The book mostly held up, though the last thirty pages veered toward the maudlin, then back again, as though flirting with, but not totally committing to, a Hollywood ending. 

McInerney is a member of the literary "brat pack," the small group of writers that led gaudy, precocious lives in the 1980's. The only other brat packer I've read is Bret Easton Ellis. I found Ellis's Less Than Zero well written but nauseating in its subject matter, and I probably won't go back to him. Still, something about early summer makes me want to crank up a synthesizer-laden dance track, drive around at night under neon lights, and come home to a good brat pack novel.