(no subject)

[cblj_backup]

So, Jay McInerney and Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis all went to school together, which seems to explain a lot about their writing. I'm really glad I didn't go to school where they did, anyway.

McInerney also shows up in one of Ellis's books, Lunar Park, which is a faux-autobiography written as if the narrator was Ellis himself (it's complicated). I know that American Psycho and McInerney's "Bright Lights, Big City" came out very close together -- Bright Lights in '89, Psycho in '91 -- and both in their own way are considered defining novels about the 80s. One of my friends asked why on earth I was reading Bright Lights because "Yes yes, we've defined the eighties, we lived through them, who cares?" and then realized "Oh my god, you didn't live through the eighties, did you?"

Not really. I was nine when Bright Lights, Big City was published.

But I don't really care about the eighties, in the sense that I have no special attachment to the decade and wasn't reading Ellis's work in order to understand it better. Mostly I'm reading McInerney because of his connection to Ellis, to see what other writers in similar circumstances were writing about. I think the problem is that Bright Lights, Big City, while published first, still reads like a bland, generic version of American Psycho. In some ways that's not a bad thing -- it's not quite as culture-specific and thus ends up being a lot less dated, which on a surface level makes it almost more relevant. Take out some of the fashion and most of the coke and the narrator could be a hipster in 2012. It's very much in the vein of Catcher In The Rye, with a hyperintelligent but aimless hero trying to figure out where he fits in. It's a lot less endearing in a twenty-six-year-old than in Catcher's teenage Holden.

But I feel like it has less relevance in the end purely because it has less depth -- it's less dated, but it just plain has less to say. It's a fast read, and it's not boring (okay sometimes it's boring) and I finished reading it, which is a big feat these days given how many books I toss aside when it becomes clear they're not going to get better. I just don't really think it's a book anyone genuinely needs to read.

Comments

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

In general, 'has less to say' is a fitting comment for most of the 80s, with the exceptions of personal computing and a few niche music, dance and theatre fields.

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

To be fair, those of us who were born in the 60s and earlier spent much of the 80s suspecting we were all going to be nuked to buggery at any given moment, so there wasn't much point putting in a lot of effort ... ;-)

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

There was a lot of good music in Britain and Australia -- Billy Bragg, The Cure, The Triffids, The Go-Betweens, hell, even Adam Ant was fun -- but I do recall it as being a Dark, Dark Time in American music. Did you at least get A-Ha's Take On Me? Best video of the decade.

Maybe the big hair and shoulder pads were meant to help shield people from fallout?

[vulgarweed.livejournal.com]

But...but...X, R.E.M., Husker Du, the Replacements, Sonic Youth, Swans, Big Black, Black Flag, the Meat Puppets, the Minutemen, Dream Syndicate, Dinosaur (pre-Jr), the Butthole Surfers, Green on Red, the Long Ryders, the Cramps, Rain Parade, Jason & the Scorchers....

Yes, largely a niche thing - but the US produced so much that was truly great during that decade, and still holds up very well, and not terribly dated-sounding, most of it.

[harkpad02.livejournal.com]

Thanks for mentioning all the good music, too. REM alone balances out much of the garbage, to say nothing of all of the stuff you mentioned. I lived in Oxford, Ohio where there was a magic independent radio station called 97X WOXY, and was immune to the stereotypical 80s music scene, which was good for me. :)

[vulgarweed.livejournal.com]

Oxford! The Miami University station?

I went to Antioch ('87-'92) in Yellow Springs, and I had a radio show on WYSO for a little while. Graveyard shift, of course.

[harkpad02.livejournal.com]

Small world. Yep, the Miami station. Yay for an Antioch grad! I ended up at BGSU myself, but listened to WOXY for years. Good stuff!

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

You make a convincing point! And you've made me re-sort my memories, because I thought of a lot of them as being the best things about the early 90s, when the US suddenly came good music-wise. Obviously that wasn't out of a vacuum, it just felt that way after the MTV-heavy stuff that made it across the water during the 80s. In England, there were loads of Australian, German and Scandinavian independent bands performing along with our own lot, but I only remember big-name American groups, which is not to say the independents didn't tour, just that I missed them if they did.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Donna Tartt wrote about novel about something being very rotten in the classics department (see also Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, though that one makes the university seem wonderful otherwise). Did Ellis and/or McInnery also write about scary universities?

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

The Secret History is Tartt's; The Rules Of Attraction is Ellis's, but I don't think McInerney wrote one. The tiny-liberal-arts-schools-in-New-England in Secret History and in Rules Of Attraction are very similar in terms of lots of rich kids with no goal in life doing coke and fucking indiscriminately. :D

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Where did she go? Bennington? *wikipedias* yes. And OMG she's 48??? She's always been this precocious kid to me!

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Mostly I'm reading McInerney because of his connection to Ellis, to see what other writers in similar circumstances were writing about impress Coworker Crush.


Fixed it for you. ;)

[pir8fancier.livejournal.com]

Being older than god, I will say that at the time I found these novels, well, juvenile. They were derivative of "Catcher in the Rye," and meant to be shocking. I always got the sense they were upping each other. Daring each other. Now, wouldn't that make a fascinating novel. A bunch of white kids at an exclusive university that take are taken as the "writers" of their generation and who actively compete against each other to produce the most shocking novel. Obviously American Psycho wins hands down so we know who won that contest. Not to be snide or anything, but I will point out that I can think of several American authors who are considered the mouthpiece of their generations (Hemingway and Fitzgerald for the 20s and 30s; Mailer, Vidal, and Capote for the 50s and 60s), and I doubt that in twenty years anyone will remember any of those three. But I suspect that people will still remember Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Mailer, Vidal, and Capote. Perhaps a post-war generation has possibly more to say than a coke-fueled one.

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't know, I think people will remember Ellis. I find AP to have genuine value, though of course mileage varies.

I've never had any desire to read Norman Mailer, and I bet if you asked around a lot of kids in their teens have never heard of him or of Gore Vidal. One of the major reasons Hemingway and Fitzgerald are remembered is that they're often required high school reading; not that they're not good writers, but a significant portion of literary memory (at least in the US) is driven by what we were made to read in high school.

I don't think it's that writers from early to mid 20th century had more to say; I think it's just that they said it in ways that are more tolerable to our educational system, which itself is stuck somewhere around the end of the 1950s.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

The Executioner's Song is an AMAZING book. It makes you look at the West in such a different way.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

I found Less Than Zero much more defining that Bright Lights....

(Hooooo yeah I remember the 80s. Hell, I remember the 70s.)

[anne armstrong (from livejournal.com)]

I'll be interested to know what you think of "Ransom", which is my favourite McInerny novel. I find Ellis all but unreadable and literally threw "American Psycho" in the bin. (I've mentioned that before.) I enjoyed Tartt's first novel but not her second. Kate Atkinson reminds me of her writing and is far more consistently fascinating.

As for the other recommendations, Capote wrote "In Cold Blood" before Mailer wrote "Executioner's Song" and has been granted the label of having invented the true crime novel genre. Of course, Mailer won the Pulitzer for ES and Capote felt very slighted. He never spoke to Mailer again, afaik.

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

I wasn't really planning on reading more McInerney to be honest -- I wasn't impressed enough by Bright Lights to want to investigate further.

I haven't read Executioner's Song, but I have to say I wasn't that impressed by In Cold Blood, either. Props to him for inventing a new genre, I genuinely do respect that, but it wasn't really a very good book.

[pir8fancier.livejournal.com]

LJ ate my brilliant 90,000-word reply. In short I will say that high-school kids are forced to read "Red Badge of Courage" and "The Scarlett Letter" and yet you don't have Crane or Hawthorne retrospectives all the time. Largely I think that these modern novels about first-world problems (not that Fitzgerland's novels aren't as well, I think that his writing is greater than his obsessions). Part of the success of these novels is that publishing went through a gigantic shift in the 80s where authors themselves became marketing tools. If either of those three had been middle-aged and unattractive, would they have received book contracts (perhaps Tartt would have)? I will also say that the problem with a novel whereby the shock factor is an indelible part of the novel is that it doesn't have any legs. It's like a mystery. Once you are shocked, does the novel have a shelf life?

Compare "American Psycho" with "In Cold Blood." Both books about murderers and murders. Current Kindle rankings are 3400 for ICB and 8600 for AP. Not bad for a novel that is fifty years old.

[gaedhal.livejournal.com]

"Bright Lights" was published in 1984. I know because I was in Jay's class at Syracuse
University when he was studying with Ray Carver -- Jay, in fact, was my study partner
at the time. And he attended Williams, not Bennington, like Tartt and Ellis. "Bright Lights"
was a short story that Gary Fisketjon read and convinced him to expand into a short
novel for their new Vintage paperback series. "Less Than Zero" also came out in that
series, hence the connection. Tama Janowitz (remember her?) was also in that first
Vintage group.

To give Jay his due, he's written a number of fairly serious works, but because he's
a partyboy (and always has been) I think it's overshadowed his real accomplishments.
And, unlike Bret, Jay isn't a dickhead. He's basically a really nice guy. Ellis -- not at all.

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

My bad -- I was under the impression they'd studied together.

I'm afraid I've never heard of Tama Janowitz, though, unless she was one of the party kids Ellis mentioned in Lunar Park.

[gaedhal.livejournal.com]

She was a big scene maker in NYC in the Eighties. She wrote "Slaves of New York,"
which was very big for about ten minutes. It's pretty unreadable now.

[vulgarweed.livejournal.com]

I turned 20 in '89, and was even on internship in NYC off and on during the late 80s and early 90s, so I was in one sense definitely the "target audience" for the McInerney and Ellis fad. But in another sense, I definitely wasn't, because those books were only about people with money. The constant cultural markers referencing designers and brands, and the assumption of infinite funds to blow on cocaine (pun intended), the assumption that of course everyone had this empty-souled upper-class suburban background....

Those books were supposed to "speak to me," but they just didn't. It was like trying to force myself to be interested in someone else's jargon-filled conversation about stock trading.

[imaginarycircus.livejournal.com]

I really loved The Secret History, but I was 20 when I read it and I was doing a Classics degree. :/ Also the writing program at Bennington is still pretty well respected, but I don't know much about it beyond that it's low residency. I have a friend who went there. I think I prefered the full residency experience.

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

I liked it, but the whole coke-snorting-hard-partying thing seemed kind of gratuitous. I loved the idea, though, and most of the writing was really enjoyable.

[gaedhal.livejournal.com]

It was 100% autobiography, believe me, right down to snorting the coke off
the toilet.