But lately, he's been returning to the city, to-OMG-hang out with the cast of Gossip Girl and stay at the trendy Standard Hotel. These days, the man (who looks like a handsome Rod Blagojevich, sans helmet hair) hides out in the Hamptons while his apartment's being renovated.
Fox.) But is this new blast of buzz good for McInerney? For the past 25 years, he's vacillated between embracing and shunning the party-boy persona that his first novel helped spur.
(The grim 1988 version starred Michael J. And next year the book will be brought back to film, with TV wonderboy Josh Schwartz (the guy behind Gossip Girland The O.C.) taking the helm. Perhaps that explains its resurgence: for the first time, it's being released with a new cover. Cocaine was involved, yes, but mostly as a metaphor for excess-a vice that the book exposes as isolating and depressing, and the city (and country) has learned to hate since Wall Street crashed, Bernie Madoff was carted off to jail, and those fabulous women who shop all day started asking for nondescript brown-paper bags.īut while we're all busy bemoaning conspicuous consumption, Bright Lights, Big City stands out as a cautionary tale worth revisiting. It's a bizarre idea: a book about being young and strung out in Manhattan was, somehow, a breath of fresh air: Bright Lights not only cemented McInerney, now 54, as a superstar among debut novelists, but defined the culture of '80s New York in all its gritty yet glamorous glory. I was fascinated with New York, and somehow, I was breaking new ground."
(After all, as McInerney reminds me, The Great Gatsbywas actually set on Long Island.) "But what could I have done?" he asks, slurping French onion soup at New York's Odeon restaurant, which appears (along with the Twin Towers) on the now-iconic cover of his novel. When Jay McInerney was publishing his first book, Bright Lights, Big City, in 1984, his publisher told him that people didn't care about New York, and that none of the great American novels had been set in the city.
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