Set in New York's coke-fuelled 1980s, Bright Lights, Big City shot Jay McInerney to fame. Over lunch in Greenwich Village 32 years later, he tells Nicole Abadee about its enduring impact on his life – and how it's possible to mix with and still skewer the rich.
You wrote Bright Lights, Big City in 1984 as a broke, 28-year-old student. An instant hit with both critics and readers, it’s regarded by many as the quintessential New York novel. How did it feel to receive that sort of acclaim with your first novel?
It was a dream come true but it was also disorienting. A lot of people were resentful of my success and felt I didn’t deserve it. It was supposed to be this zeitgeist book that defined an era and a generation, and nobody has ever done that more than once. It’s nearly impossible to follow that kind of success – in a way it sets you up for failure; there’s an expectation that you have to top this book and that’s not easy to do. About six weeks after publication I had lunch with my agent and she said, “I’ve never seen anything like this. I hate to tell you this, but the words Bright Lights, Big City are going to be in the first lines of your obituary.” It was a strange thing to say but I can say now, 35 years later, that she was right. No one can write about me without talking about it. I’ve gotten used to it.
You’ve said the book would have been less interesting if it hadn’t arisen from a dark period in which your wife left you, you were fired from your job as a fact-checker at The New Yorker and your mother died. Why?
Nobody has a deep understanding of human nature until they experience loss and suffering. Loss is a fundamental human experience, and without an experience of that an artist is not going to have very profound insights.
What was your aim? Did you expect it to be so successful?
I just hoped to get a job in teaching or journalism out of it. Nobody had any big expectations for it. There was a sense at the time that the novel was a dead art form, and mine was seen as very quirky. The initial print run was small, and the publisher had not planned to do a reprint, so when the book sold out there was a period of five to six weeks when it was unavailable. That seemed to create a frenzy, people wanted to buy this book everyone was talking about.
Your new book, Bright, Precious Days, is the last in a trilogy about Manhattan couple Russell and Corrine Calloway, whose marriage is into its third decade. What is it about marriage that interests you so much?
It’s the most fundamental human relationship, the one from which all other relationships are literally born. It’s the most basic, irreducible unit – a man, a woman, blessed by some sort of official sanction.
You’ve been married four times. You met your wife, Anne Hearst, 30 years ago but it was not until 2006 that you reconnected and married. If you’d married her back in 1986, would you have had a Calloways-length marriage?
No, I fear I would have screwed it up, because I was reckless and restless. I always believed I was ready and that I was doing the right thing but apparently I wasn’t.
Any regrets?
No. I’ve enjoyed my life. I’m not going to be on my deathbed saying, “I wish I’d married a whole bunch of other girls”. I like the fact that I worked through my wilder impulses. You can say that I failed three times or that I had three interesting marriages before the final one, which is how I look at it.
Has New York changed much in your 30 years there?
Yes. When I first came to New York it was dirty and dangerous and just recovering from being on the brink of bankruptcy. There was a heroin epidemic and white people were fleeing in larger numbers than they were coming in. It was also a very exciting time, with a lot of creative energy – there was punk rock music, painting was being reinvented, there was performance art. New York has been slowly gentrified, so it’s a lot safer and cleaner now, but something’s been lost in the process. It’s harder now for younger people to afford to live in Manhattan. Bright, Precious Days is very much about how the middle class is being pushed out of Manhattan. There are so many wealthy people here, and it’s tough for people in the arts or the non-profit sector. My wife makes fun of me when I glorify that era [the 1980s] but sometimes I miss it because it was so colourful.
Do you think 9/11 had a lasting impact on the city?
No. People didn’t flee the city, it had a surprisingly small impact on Manhattan and our daily life. New York has never been about the past – there’s no sense of history here. Nobody cares where you came from or who your family is. They care about what you’re doing right now and what you’re doing tomorrow and what you can do for them. I do think though that people are now more inclined to be pleasant to each other.
You initially felt it would be frivolous to write fiction about 9/11, but you changed your mind and tackled it in The Good Life, the second of your trilogy. Why?
I realised that if people could write about the Holocaust, I could write about a lesser catastrophe, shocking as 9/11 was to New Yorkers. It just became a question of how to frame it. I eventually wrote about the effect on one household.
The trilogy satirises New York’s rich and powerful yet these days you mix in that milieu. Some critics say you can no longer be objective about it. Is that fair?
No it’s not. It’s a fallacy to extrapolate from my biography and assume that because I’m married to a wealthy woman [Hearst is a publishing scion and sister of Patty] that I can’t be objective about the wealthy. If you read Bright, Precious Days, with the exception of Luke, the rich characters are almost universally objects of satire. In what sense have I not been objective? I mean, look at the f---ing book!
Did you read much as a child?
Yes. My family moved around a lot because of my dad’s job in sales, so it was hard to make friends, and I spent a lot of time alone in the library or at home. I was reading pretty serious books from age 13 or 14. Jack London was one of the first authors I really liked, then I discovered those like Salinger. I read Dylan Thomas when I was 14 and wanted to be a poet, but once I started reading Hemingway and Joyce I realised prose could be as musical and interesting as fiction. The novel had the additional benefit of a plot, so I decided instead to be a novelist.
What are you reading?
I’ve just read The Nix by Nathan Hill, which was very good, and am re-reading a wonderful book called Light Years by James Salter, a great but unappreciated American writer who died last year. I really loved Everybody Behaves Badly by Lesley M.M. Blume about Hemingway’s years in Spain and Paris in the 1920s, and about the writing of The Sun Also Rises. He was a real shit.
When you arrived in New York you hoped to replicate the success of writers you admired who’d lived there: Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Don DeLillo. You have. Is literary success all it’s cracked up to be?
It’s been more fraught with perils than I imagined, in terms of becoming a target of resentment. It’s not something you imagine when you’re writing your first novel, that some people might hate you for accomplishing just that. But I can’t think of anybody I’d trade my life with, or any other writer whose career I wish I could trade with mine. I guess that must mean I’m pretty happy. Success absolves a lot of sins.
