Brights Light, Dim Bimbo might be a better title for this fictional
memoir of an aspiring young actress in Manhattan, a 20-year-old
airhead who peppers her narrative with lots of "likes" and "I go"s
and "yadda yadda yadda"s. But mostly her story seems the stuff of
woman-hating fantasy - she sinks so low only a boy-writer would
bother to document, and McInerney does so with barely disguised
contempt. Alison Poole is devoted to excess, which may indeed
beckon the fall of civilization, as McInerney's pretentious
epigraph implies. But she's hardly representative of much other
than her own self-description as a "deprived deb," "young stuff,"
and "unit" - a contemporary girl full of innocent chatter ("Fucking
is one thing. But sticking your face in someone's crotch - I mean,
that's really intimate") and charming insouciance ("Usually when I
meet a guy it takes me about three seconds to wonder how big his
dick is"). Alison worked once "for about three seconds," so her
current club-hopping, coke-snorting, and acting lessons are
subsidized by her five-times-married father, when she can find him,
which isn't often, since he's off chasing girls younger than his
daughter. Alison's adventures in the big city center on boys - even
the men are boys there, she tells us - and her friends, a sexually
voracious bunch of girls whose motto is "can't rape the willing."
What Alison prowls for are "boys in Paul Stuart suits with
six-figure salaries and a little hellfire in their eyes." Such is
Dean Chasen, this week's willing weenie, a bond salesman with the
soul of a poet (like, he quotes Shakespeare!) who considers Alison
his "postmodern girl," and she's totally "in lust" with him. There
was a time when Alison would wake up at five in the afternoon with
"plugged sinuses and sticky hair" and "some kind of white stuff in
every opening." These days she's a little more concerned with
survival - at the end of this lost weekend is a clinic in
Minnesota, where Alison finds herself hoping that "all this
hysterical noise which is supposedly my life" is mostly a dream. A
cheap bit of redemption, to be sure. McInerney's clearly not the
meager talent that Bret Easton Ellis recently proved to be (for all
the hoopla, Bright Lights remains a brilliant book) but he better
find something worth writing about, lest he fade with yesterday's
news. (Kirkus Reviews)
This novel focuses on a section of 1980s Manhattan culture.
Beautiful, blunt, world-weary and 20, Alison depicts the
group-indulgence and parental indifference that conspire against
her, as her plight is drawn with humour and finesse.
General
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