I read about thirty pages of Bright Lights, Big City before the rightful owner of that particular copy of Jay McInerney’s novel reclaimed it, and I never felt impelled to pursue the matter. It seemed to me like a reasonably competent piece of cheeky postgraduate writing: Holden Caulfield Gets Older But Doesn’t Grow Up, yuppie subdivision, with lots of coke-snorting and girl-chasing, but nobody—least of all the novelist—concerned with where the money for this lifestyle was coming from. There were some fairly clever verbal tricks and, had I gotten further into it, I might have enjoyed, I suspect, the author’s account of his fictional alter ego’s misadventures as a fact-checker for the not very fictional Gotham magazine, McInerney having spent half a year in The New Yorker’s awesome fact-checking department.
But, like so many novels whose stock-in-trade is the monologue of the writer/hero replete with cute observations about what’s going on around and inside him, this one does not translate well to the screen. McInerney, who is credited with the screenplay, and his director, James Bridges, have tried to preserve some of the book’s hallmarks via the intertitles and the narration in the second person singular: the novelist/narrator cozying up to, yet finally disassociating himself from, the hero through this somewhat hectoring, hortatory chumminess. (Actually, that second person singular comes from an early novel of Michel Butor, but no matter; it’s a device that can work in a novel but cannot be sustained on film, where its unavoidable intermittencies make it seem strained and mildly ludicrous.)
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