A strong finish
A strong finish ( English original title: Bright Lights, Big City ) is a novel by Jay McInerney from 1986, the original was first published in 1984. The novel served as the basis for the melodrama, filmed by James Bridges in 1988, The Glaring Lights of the Big City .
content
The key novel deals with the superficial professional and private life of the better-off (especially New York society) in the 1980s and offers a short but concise narrative style from the perspective of a nameless first-person narrator, who even with an important New York York Society Magazine works as a fact-checker and has to check articles for their truthfulness regarding places, times, people etc.
In the course of the novel, his girlfriend, top model Amanda, leaves him. He spends the nights in classy Manhattan discos with his fashionable friend Tad Allagash and takes cocaine. He loses his job, meets a country girl and over time loses the trust of the people in the nightclubs, at the fashion shows and parties. Even his credit card is no longer accepted at the machine and he loses his desire for cult and consumption.
criticism
“A witty farce on city life in the eighties. With a keen eye for the curious, Jay McInerney demonstrates the poses and fashionable rituals of the city at night. Behind the comedy, however, lurks the fate of a young man who wants to enter human society but does not find a human company - a key novel of the yuppie generation. Funny, malicious, and above all precisely written. "
“Jay McInerney, who was almost 30 years old at the time, constructed a prototype with" Bright Lights, Big City ". In ever new, adventurously badly written attempts, he revolves around the existential crisis at six in the morning when the only girl in the disco has a tattooed bald head and the cocaine supplies have run out - there is no question in this whole outpouring that could interest anyone other than his house dealer , no problem that could not be solved by Alka Seltzer. "
literature
- Jay McInerney: Ein stark Abgang , Verlag Neues Leben 1986, ISBN 3355008400
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://www.single-generation.de/usa/jay_mcinerney.htm
- ↑ Matthias Matussek: "He just looked stunning" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 39 , 1988 ( online - 26 September 1988 ).