Bright Lights, Different City

When Jay McInerney was publishing his first book, Bright Lights, Big City, in 1984, his publisher told him that people didn't care about New York, and that none of the great American novels had been set in the city. (After all, as McInerney reminds me, The Great Gatsby  was actually set on Long Island.) "But what could I have done?" he asks, slurping French onion soup at New York's Odeon restaurant, which appears (along with the Twin Towers) on the now-iconic cover of his novel. "I'd written a book. I was fascinated with New York, and somehow, I was breaking new ground."

It's a bizarre idea: a book about being young and strung out in Manhattan was, somehow, a breath of fresh air: Bright Lights not only cemented McInerney, now 54, as a superstar among debut novelists, but defined the culture of '80s New York in all its gritty yet glamorous glory. Cocaine was involved, yes, but mostly as a metaphor for excess—a vice that the book exposes as isolating and depressing, and the city (and country) has learned to hate since Wall Street crashed, Bernie Madoff was carted off to jail, and those fabulous women who shop all day started asking for nondescript brown-paper bags.

But while we're all busy bemoaning conspicuous consumption, Bright Lights, Big City stands out as a cautionary tale worth revisiting. Perhaps that explains its resurgence: for the first time, it's being released with a new cover. And next year the book will be brought back to film, with TV wonderboy Josh Schwartz (the guy behind Gossip Girl and The O.C.) taking the helm. (The grim 1988 version starred Michael J. Fox.) But is this new blast of buzz good for McInerney? For the past 25 years, he's vacillated between embracing and shunning the party-boy persona that his first novel helped spur. These days, the man (who looks like a handsome Rod Blagojevich, sans helmet hair) hides out in the Hamptons while his apartment's being renovated. But lately, he's been returning to the city, to—OMG—hang out with the cast of Gossip Girl and stay at the trendy Standard Hotel. To many, it may sound like the McInerney we know and love (or loathe?) is back. But, as he tells NEWSWEEK, he's returned to a whole new city, and it's one he can't quite explain yet. Excerpts:

The new cover still shows the Odeon, but it's hardly recognizable behind the huge white text. How do you feel about the change?
I approved it with some reluctance. I was sad to lose the World Trade towers. There was some talk after September 11 about changing the cover, and I said absolutely not because it was important to keep the towers. Anyway, there's probably going to be a movie tie-in version next year.

Last I read, the plan was to update the story for the new film.
Josh Schwartz, the director, said to me, "Imagine this is 2007, right before the economic meltdown, and Tad Allagash works for Lehman Brothers." I'm not taking a stand on this: we did it once in the '80s and it wasn't really successful.

Were you happy with it?
Nah, I don't think anybody was. But I'm not sorry that people still think of Bright Lights, Big City as a novel; The Graduate  was a pretty terrific novel when it was published and nobody even knows it's a book now.