#3 BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY by Jay McInerney
I’m thinking back to the fall of 2003. I was living in Missoula, Montana, setting myself on a course of self-destruction with drugs and drink, directionless, lost in a new city and losing sight of whatever ambitions had led me there. It was not a big city, Missoula, and the lights were not terribly bright. You could see the stars there just fine. But anyway there were moments in the course of reading Bright Lights, Big City last fall where I felt like I was reading through old journals. The second-person narration was rendered more effective by the eerie similarities between my life and the life of the book’s protagonist, just effective enough last year to tap into some powerful emotional memories surrounding the death of my mother. If I had read the novel in 2003, I might have lost my grip on reality, the second-person tense giving it the discomfiting feeling of personal address. As it was, the novel provided instead a certain kind of catharsis, helping me to reflect back on that pain without being overwhelmed by it.
With such a strong emotional connection to that novel, it’s unsurprising that Patrick de Witt’s ABLUTIONS: NOTES FOR A NOVEL left me a little cold, but maybe it’s unfortunate. Ablutions is the heir apparent to Bright Lights, Big City, right down to the self-destruction and the inverted point of view, and it was superbly written, but it was a little to bleak throughout, without the lining of hope that McInerney offered. Still, for any fans of the former, I’d recommend the latter without hesitation.
