“Your brain at this moment is composed of brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers. They are tired and muddy from their long march through the night. There are holes in their boots and they are hungry. They need to be fed. The need the Bolivian Marching Powder.” Quote from the opening scene of this 1984 Jay McInerney novel told in cool, hip, drug-hyped second person. But, alas, this is merely the surface.
Each time I read this book, I comprehend more clearly how the words on every page have sharp razor-like edges that cut into the heart of the narrator. However, to say specifically why this is so would be to say too much since the more complete story of what the narrator is going through is not disclosed until the closing chapters.
Below are my comments coupled with one-line snappers from the novel’s main character, a 24-year old coke-snorting would-be writer working as a fact-checker for a New Yorker-like magazine and living in a downtown apartment by himself after Amanda, his fashion model wife, called telling him she isn’t coming back and he will be hearing from her lawyer to settle the divorce:
“The girl with the shaved head has a scar tattooed on her scalp. It looks like a long, sutured gash. You tell her it is very realistic. She takes this as a compliment and thanks you. You meant as opposed to romantic. “I could use one of those right over my heart,” you say.”
The narrator’s words foreshadow how he really isn’t after the thrills of the hip scene but something emotionally deeper and much more personal. I can appreciate how many dislike the novel and the whining, distressed voice of the narrator since, in many respects, his emotional turmoil is similar to that other sensitive, distraught, whining 16-year old back in the late 1940s – Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger’s classic.
“It’s 10:58. You’ve worn out the line about the subway breaking down. Maybe tell Clara you stopped to take a free look at Kinky Karla and got bitten by her snake.”
Clara is the narrator’s boss at the fact finding department; Kinky Karla and her snake one of the thrills the old street hawkers hawk out on the street. Both of these worlds – the clock-driven, drab, humdrum office and the blaring girls-girls--girls sleaze – are exactly what the narrator in his current anguished state does not need.
“There was a cartoon you used to watch with a time-traveling turtle and a benevolent wizard. The turtle would journey back to say, the French revolution, inevitably getting in way over his head. At the last minute, when he was stretched out under the guillotine, he would cry out, “Help, Mr. Wizard!” And the wizard, on the other end of the time warp, would wave his wand and rescue the hapless turtle.”
Ha! A common wish, particularly among young adults, to be saved from the need to do a nine to five pressure cooker job. All of my education for this? Mr. Wizard, please get me the hell out of here! Sorry, life isn’t a cartoon – you will have to find your own way out.
“You insert another piece of paper, again you type the date. At the left margin you type, “Dear Amanda,” but when you look at the paper it reads, “Dead Amanda.” Screw this. You are not going to commit any great literature tonight.”
So telling. Writing fiction nearly always requires an emotional distance; when one is undergoing extreme personal upset, such as our novel’s narrator, it is next to impossible to move past drafting the first paragraph.
“Wade saunters in and stops in front of your desk. He looks at you and clicks his tongue. “What kind of flowers do you want on your grave? I already have the epitaph: He didn’t face facts.”
This exchange after the narrator, by his own admission, completely screwed up in performing his job. His refusal to face and deal with his life beyond the office gives an ironic twist to 'He didn’t face facts'.
“When you first came to the city you spent a night here with Amanda. You have friends to stay with but you wanted to spend that first night at the Plaza. . . . Your tenth-floor room was tiny and overlooked an airshaft; though you could not see the city out the window, you believed that it was spread out at your feet. The limousines around the entrances seemed like carriages, and you felt that someday one would wait for you. Today they put you in mind of carrion birds, and you cannot believe your dreams were so shallow."
Such is the truth of the city: if you have money and are on the rise, the Big Apple is a dream come true; if you are penniless and on the skids, it quickly turns into a cold, cruel deathtrap.
This was Jay McInerney’s first novel. He went on to write a half a dozen more, but none having nearly the hype and fame as this one. Curiously, from what I gather, Jay has spent much of the last thirty years attempting to separate his personal identity from the identity of this novel’s narrator. Such is the power of literature.
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