‘Bright Lights, Big City’ at Forty
Jay McInerney’s debut novel was the first work of fiction to explore yuppie culture, and its success changed American publishing.
Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney’s debut novel, was published in 1984 and thus celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year. If you are under sixty years of age, this probably doesn’t mean much to you, but by the time McInerney’s book arrived, literary fiction had been in the doldrums for most of the late 1970s and early 1980s. That period is fascinatingly documented in Dan Sinykin’s recent book, Big Fiction. Sinykin quotes Gary Fisketjon, a legendary Random House editor, who told an interviewer, “When I came into the business in the late 70s, [literary writers] couldn’t even get published because they sold so poorly in hardcover and they never went into paperback. There was a backlog of very good writers who were wildly under-published for a period of years. It was a good time for a kid to come into it because you had a lot accomplished writers to choose from.”
In this vacuum stepped McInerney, the first breakout star of his literary generation and one of the most prominent members of the so-called “literary Brat Pack,” which included writers like Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz, Susan Minot, Donna Tartt, and a handful of others. They took their collective name from a group of young actors—Emilio Estevez, Andrew McCarthy, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy etc—who were becoming Hollywood stars around the same time that McInerney and his cohort were becoming publishing sensations. The “Brat Pack” name was itself a playful reference to the “Rat Pack,” a gang of Hollywood celebrities in the 1950s—Frank Sinatra, Joey Bishop, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and a handful of others—who liked to hang out, drink, chase women, and generally be seen together at various glamorous venues in New York, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles.
