Jay McInerney Maps a Marriage Onto Manhattan’s Boom and Bust

Jay McInerney’s literary career began with one of those only-in-New-York lucky breaks. His debut novel, Bright Lights, Big City (1984), was a brisk bildungsroman about an aspiring novelist (strongly resembling McInerney) working as a fact-checker at a top-tier magazine (strongly resembling the New Yorker). McInerney had studied under Raymond Carver, whose “dirty realism” and rough-hewn sensibility he brought to coke-dusted, go-go Manhattan. The book was a hit and went on to sell a million copies. For a time he was a Page Six regular alongside other “literary brat pack” writers like Tama Janowitz and Bret Easton Ellis.

Then came the backlash. A weak second novel, Ransom (1985), was rushed out; a thin third, Story of My Life (1988), is notable in hindsight mainly for having been about a woman who later starred in a political sex scandal. The film version of Bright Lights, starring Michael J. Fox, flopped.