Bright Lights, Big City (1984) is about a twenty-four year old Manhattan writer working as a fact checker for a New Yorker type magazine. Unnamed, he has a wife, Amanda, who has recently left him, and some other family problems to be revealed later, all of which prompts him to go to nightclubs and make his “assault on the citadel of good times,” with the help of his “Bolivian Marching Powder” (cocaine). The novel is written in an assertive second person present tense, the effect of which is hypnotic (“You are getting very sleepy…”) as well as enlivening. Another effect is that some of the subsequent quotations will have to be edited to replace the second person with the third, so that we can avoid accusing the reader of any of the narrator’s misdeeds.
The first fifty or so pages use ludicrous simile with high frequency. A stock comic device, the simile also occasionally helps McInerney demonstrate his hero’s education, and the dubious imaginative purposes to which he turns it. There is a girl he’s talking to with a shaved head and a scar tattoo at, since he’s not sure which, either Heartbreak or Lizard Lounge, whose voice is “like the New Jersey State anthem played through an electric shaver.” After a sniff of refreshment in the bathroom, he spots another he prefers and makes an approach through the crowd, “moving his stuff like a Bad Spade.” Is this a reference to a bad card slipped among other cards, those cards being the others on the dance floor in their “slalom of synthesized conga rhythm”? There’s a lot of elected capitalization in this sequence, from the “Bolivian Marching Powder” to “Bolivian Soldiers” or his friend Tad Allagash’s conquest for the night, called a “Hose Queen”. Whether “Bad Spade” is a racial thing, a cards thing, or both, it gets confused by the crowd. Much more successful is the treatment of a third girl’s dancing in metaphor instead of simile, thus with less pressure to exaggerate or fabulate. This he calls the “oiled ellipses of her hips and shoulders”, nicely consonant and corresponding to a moving image where the anthem through the electric shaver was not to a sound. The verbal rally with the third girl ends, the hero losing, and he notes her eyes “glaze in a way that reminds [him] precisely of the closing of a sandblasted glass shower door.” This is rather good.
The next morning the light it much too bright, and there’s another simile which is a bold hint at the novel’s twist, though it passes first as folksy wisdom and experience: “The glare is like a mother’s reproach.” This is a simile in a very different, though still comic mode, with the pun on “glare” bringing the two elements into semantic as well as visual relationship. The hero’s boss in the Department of Factual Verification, Clara Tillinghurst, believes that “learning is the pounding of facts, like so many nails, into the knotty oak of recalcitrant heads,” while the magazine at large is “like a cold, impenetrable New England Family which keeps even the black sheep suffocating within the fold.” In more conventional fashion, Tillinghurst (dubbed “the Clinger”) has “a mind like a steel mousetrap”, an actual cliché save for the addition of “mouse”, though the workings of her heart, “like a twelve minute egg,” are more idiosyncratic. There’s a bit of collegial commiseration with Mrs. Bender the grammarian in the office, and McInerney writes that “Her complaint is refreshing, like rain at the end of a muggy day.” This is at once too subjective and too conventional; not anyone could find rain refreshing, but anyone could easily imagine how someone might.
McInerney falls into another of the perils of simile on page forty-eight, when has his hero take more cocaine and report that “The sweet nasal burn hits like a swallow of cold beer on a hot August day.” The refreshing effect of cold beer is too often observed, and beer itself not enough distant from or disassociated with cocaine, for the comparison to startle and generate enough of that same effect. A simile of this sort should be a basically sardonic device; “x” and “y” are really not alike, except in the particular way that for the author’s purposes they must be.
After the first fifty pages of attempted bewilderment, the plot proper gets going and the similizing habit recedes. Though on the subway there’s an encounter with a group of Hasidim, and the musing that the one sitting opposite “believes he is one of God’s chosen, whereas [the hero] feel like an integer in a random series of numbers.” Unfortunately the “one” is not a contradiction of the “integer”, but the macrocosmic thought is well countered by the comment that follows: “Still, what a fucking haircut.”
The protagonist is eventually fired for allowing several errors through to publication, and resorts to getting high in the bathroom in the office. The critical vial of cocaine “bounces once against the porcelain and then submerges with an insolent splash that resembles the sound of a very large brown trout spitting out the hook of a very small and painstakingly presented dry fly.” This is the most elaborate and best of the similes in the novel, though much depends on the word “insolent” which precedes it. It’s probably difficult for most to produce in the mind the sound of a trout spitting out a hook, but “insolent splash” has effectively matched that to the real sound of the vial in the toilet bowl, through the attitude of the fish. Is that “very large brown trout” the high he’s fishing for? Or is it fate rebuking and spitting at him? The finicky manipulation of the bait is well paired to the fiddling with the glass vial, giving the simile an additional tactile element.
As already suggested, the further outré similes in Bright Lights, Big City seem to be outlets for the hero’s literary energy; he wants to write while avoiding the “dull grind of actual creation,” to be a “Dylan Thomas without the paunch, F. Scott Fitzgerald without the crack-up.” If in their frequency in the first three chapters they seem a result more of impulse than craft, the effect is itself a deliberate one, being a sense of his frustration. When he runs into his ex-wife at a party near the novel’s end, she’s accompanied by a “Mediterranean hulk in a white silk shirt”, and the appraisal that follows is a sheer hostile expression of perceived intellectual superiority, much as it credits the man, who the would be writer says “looks like he was carved by Praxiteles in 350 B.C. and touched up by Paramount in 1947.” The hero’s main consolation is to have the last word and the last laugh. McInerney wrote a novel about a kind of writing, then, with all the attendant anxiety and pride. The absurd simile is the hero’s only means of influence over his experience of the haphazard plot, the only reprieve from the onslaught of big city misfortune. Things conclude with a kind of communion scene, rolls of fresh bread traded for a pair of Ray-Bans, recapitulating memories of the mother and of his Catholic past. It’s a metaphor rather than the real thing, but one that might tether his imagination and get him back to the writing desk. McInerney tells us at least that it’s enough to teach him that he will now have to “go slowly” and “learn everything all over again.”