Living in a Material World: Men & Women in
The Great Gatsby and Bright Lights, Big City

Jay McInerney, in spite of authoring some of the most relevant fiction of his time, has rarely been the subject of serious scholarly attention.[4] Any study discussing McInerney's novels favorably, and indeed comparing them with those of a canonized literary genius like Fitzgerald, must first tackle this critical disregard. Throughout the history of McInerney's public reception, reviewers have noted his similarities to Fitzgerald almost "ritualistically" and usually disparagingly, considering his writing little more than a poor imitation.[5] Most have systematically failed to truly fathom the depths available in such a contrast. Fitzgerald is in fact a useful author for discussing both McInerney's critical placement and his work, for they have occupied similar cultural positions in regards to their times. Both have written about "what it was like, for some, to be young, privileged, and American"[6] in their respective decades, and both have faced critical neglect during their lifetimes, with Fitzgerald's canonical position solidifying only after his death. John W. Aldridge's Talents and Technicians, a book largely derogatory of Eighties popular fiction in general, remarks that

Jay McInerney has been the recipient of far more publicity than is good for a young writer of promise . . . [He has] experienced the best and worst effects of the kind of golden boy celebrity once enjoyed by the young F. Scott Fitzgerald . . . with whom he has been repeatedly compared, and if one does not look too closely, the comparisons seem quite apt. [Both men] wrote first novels that either reflected the manners and morals of their respective generations or . . . were recognized by their generations as telling some essential truth about them. But the similarity ends there, and the fact that it does is a measure of the limitations of McInerney's vision when assessed in relation to the larger and more complex vision of his distinguished predecessor . . . [which] enabled him at a very young age to create . . . something far more substantial than a shallow and merely documentary portrait of the manners and morals of American Jazz Age youth.[7]

Early promise, extraordinary publicity, excessive celebrity, and the totemic quality of generational fiction are extremely important factors to note. These issues enter into most discussions of McInerney, as they do with Fitzgerald, and are in part responsible for their critical troubles. Matthew J. Bruccoli, an indefatigable defender of Fitzgerald's professional abilities, states that the "posthumous Fitzgerald revival was a triumph of genius over misfortune - testimony to the enduring force of words on paper." This "misfortune" was not simply Fitzgerald's long struggle with his well-documented personal problems, but also the divide between his status as a literary reputation and a legendary celebrity. At times, Bruccoli writes, it often seemed that Fitzgerald "was almost deliberately damaging his literary stature by trading permanent fame for notoriety."[8] McInerney has also been a semi-willing victim of "the carnage wrought by media overexposure and self-destructive living," as evidenced by his highly publicized nightlife and romantic entanglements.[9] These authors, due in part to their celebrity and positions as the "voice of a generation," were granted a limited time in the public eye, the reward for their early promise. McInerney provides insight into his own reception and eventual rejection when he discusses Fitzgerald's fate: "the spotlight retreated from him, really. It was very strange the way his career was so much a function of the decade . . . He became a symbol of the time, then he was crucified when people became disenchanted with their own excesses."[10] In "The Short Happy Life of the American Yuppie," Hendrik Hertzberg describes the fate of the "young urban professional" in an analogous fashion: "We turned him into an effigy, and then we hanged him. He became the collective projection of a moral anxiety. We loaded onto him everything we hated about the times we had been living through - everything we hated about what we suspected we ourselves might have become . . . Then we strung the little bastard up."[11] McInerney, whose novels immortalized and occasionally celebrated the yuppie, could very well have provided the face for such an effigy. Both authors, famous for writing generational fiction and successfully capturing their cultural zeitgeists, were disregarded when times changed.

But the similarity does not in fact end there. Aldridge's implication that McInerney's work is only "a shallow and merely documentary portrait of the manners and morals" of his generation reveals a sad lack of critical perspective. At times, his character analysis is so naïve that one wonders if he merely glanced through the novels, noting only their superficial aspects in order to ignore the deeper implications.[12] His tendency to see McInerney merely as a stylistic technician instead of as a literary talent brings to mind one of Fitzgerald's contemporary reviewers, who quipped that authors of the younger generation "know they write such clever stuff, / But not that it is stuff, though clever."[13] It is only with time that This Side of Paradise has come to be seen as something more "substantial" than a portrait of the Jazz Age, and this is still not a unanimous critical opinion.[14] Even after the publication of The Great Gatsby, usually considered Fitzgerald's most lasting contribution to American literature, critics were little able to see more than "'a fine yarn, exhilaratingly spun.'" As Jackson R. Bryer remarks in the introduction to his bibliographic study of Fitzgerald's critical reputation, not

only is there wide variance between the [original reviews] respecting the general worth of the novel, but critics at that time apparently were unable to go beyond the external plot and characters . . . [The] difference in approach and degree of understanding [today] lends considerable support to a theory that the generation of the 1920's was too close to the overt subject matter of Fitzgerald's works to consider them in any other light than as attempts to portray his times. Today, this theory continues, we are distanced enough, both physically and emotionally, from the Twenties, to find additional depth in a book like The Great Gatsby . . .[15]

The relative historical proximity of McInerney's work has had much to do with his lack of regard by Aldridge and other critics, a situation that time may remedy. Perhaps the next wave of critics released by universities will have enough distance from McInerney's initial appearance to see beyond the media attention and appraise the value of his work, not only as a means of understanding his time, but as a contribution to American letters in general.[16] Samuel Johnson's remark that while "'an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead, we rate them by his best,'" need not always be the case.[17] Studies such as this one, it is hoped, will help speed the process of McInerney's critical acceptance. By comparing McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City with Fitzgerald's masterpiece The Great Gatsby, this study will attempt to identify the "additional depth" in his work that has hitherto been ignored and neglected.[18]

Crucial to understanding McInerney's work, and that of Fitzgerald, is an understanding of the nation and the decades that so fundamentally shaped their lives and their work. The arenas of lived experience that most extremely informed their fictions were the economic and sexual cultures unique to the modern American boom times. The social collusion between these two facets of life fashioned these authors' central critiques of their society's ideological contradiction, the American dream.