In 1984, reelected president Ronald Reagan continued his supply-side economic policies, helping to propel Wall Street to new heights, and thus making New York City the ideal playground for quick money-making, ruthless ambition, and undisguised cupidity. Disheartened and looking for more propitious cultural horizons, some young people went abroad, as we have seen, while others, dazzled by the “Bright Lights” of the “Big City,” embraced its fast pace and frenzied rhythms. This wondrous experience of the city as a dizzying whirlwind of late-night bars, drug paradises, and outlandish fashion trends was the subject of several novels of the 1980s.
The young writer Jay McInerney led the dance with his bestseller Bright Lights, Big City (1984), followed by Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero (1985) and Tama Janowitz’s Slaves of New York (1986). However, the celebrated city of this “Brat Pack” generation slowly began to fade like an elusive dream. McInerney chronicled its dramatic demise in Brightness Falls,2 the third volume of his New York trilogy,3 presented at the Village Voice on November 9, 1993.
Jay McInerney
“The eighties were bad for Americans, but certainly good for me.”4
—mcinerney, Village Voice reading, November 3, 1993
A dashing Jay McInerney in a dark suit and pale blue turtleneck came into our bookshop, accompanied by his French publisher, Olivier Cohen, to discuss his novel Brightness Falls, just out under the French title Trente ans et des poussières.5
His translator Jean-Pierre Carasso introduced him, pointing out the radical departure of the author’s most recent fiction from his previous novels: “McInerney has outgrown the ‘slick and hip’ label attached to the young writer of contemporary New York. The horrific eighties were behind, and the nineties were going through a time of increased consciousness and commitment to social justice.”
The author opened his reading with an excerpt from the second volume of his trilogy, Story of My Life (1988), in which Alison, the twenty-year-old protagonist, a model and aspiring starlet, is caught up in “a coterie of club-hopping and coke-addicted friends,” and racing toward a nervous breakdown.
This work is a prelude to Brightness Falls that depicts the stark reality of a new decade that awaited this generation whose “youth was gone, and fun and games were over.”6 Corinne Calloway7 and her husband Russell are the dream New York couple, she a financial trader and he a publishing editor, doing two quintessential jobs of their time and class. However, “their bliss is also their curse,” McInerney reminded us: “They are middle-aged, their marriage is going downhill, and they have become conscious of the fragility of life, afraid of losing jobs, spouse, or lover, making them more attentive and sensitive to the social realties around them.”
“As I was walking down Fifth Avenue,” the author went on, “my eye caught a typical New York scene: a celebrity, a billionaire, the known owner of multiple industries was standing on the pavement with his two bodyguards next to a man lying there at their feet, a pathetic-looking homeless guy. This is the kind of novel I would love to write, I thought, with those people in it.”
And he did, with Corinne, a high-powered business woman who volunteers in a soup kitchen for the homeless, embodying the awakening spirit of her epoch with the emerging social consciousness Carasso referred to in his introduction. McInerney acknowledged that the voice of this complex female protagonist was “the one I enjoyed writing.” As a broad social panorama of the New York of the early 1990s, this story of a contemporary New York couple spurred the audience to ask questions about the city’s present and pressing societal issues.
Q: “Have you counted up the amount of cocaine consumed in your novel and the cost of it?” [giggles]
McInerney: “For me, the ‘marching powder’ (cocaine) defines this period of addiction and consumerism. Despite what you read in Time or other magazines, there is still lots of cocaine around, but on the decline, while heroin is on the rise. In the novel, one of the characters switches from cocaine to heroin to take the edge off his cocaine addiction.” [more giggles]
Q: “Are you aware that your books may encourage the use of drugs?”
McInerney: “Drugs have been part of my social landscape since I was a teenager. How could I not write about this when they are part of the world I speak about? Not that I promote drugs, but they exist, and they are also a kind of metaphor for the treadmill consumption we have in the novel for consumerism. But it seems to me that’s less fashionable than in the ’80s.”
Q: “What is the fashionable addiction in the ’90s?”
McInerney: “Spirituality.” [bursts of laughter]
Another woman asked what he thought about the politically correct movement that was raging in academic circles, on campuses and in all walks of life.
McInerney: “There is a frightening wind blowing in the US and Canada, which is this notion of political correctness: Blacks should talk about Blacks, whites about whites, men about men and women about women. There is a Black character in my novel, someone I like very much, and I was questioned by a critic about my right to write about a Black man. As a writer, you project yourself into all kinds of persons and experiences and, as a reader, you put yourself in someone else’s shoes . . .“To me, political correctness is a creation of the left; it’s a lack of humor or the sign of a defective humor gland. [laughter] In my opinion, artists and writers would do best to ignore it. It’s a big debate on campuses: what authorizes the deconstruction of the old academic canon? Huge subject, big debate, vital issues are at stake. Sometimes, we trip over ridiculous things. In France you’ve had that debate over Céline for a long time. This debate is not over.”
His answer sparked much dissent throughout the audience, with heated exchanges of pros and the cons. The sound of chairs scraping the floor signaled that a number of people were walking out.
“A book is not just a personal relation between the reader and the page. Texts have to be analyzed, and how could we remain silent about, say, Shakespeare’s anti-Semitic prejudices?” a woman asked in an angry voice.
McInerney: “I was rather glib in my characterization of this. This is a quagmire, and it’s chilling when authors start censoring themselves. On the other hand, it’s constructive when they examine their own prejudices and if they have stereotypes and racial, sexual, or ethnic biases. I’d love to split here in the middle of the issue.” [laughter]
A man stood up. He did not want to ask a question but rather share with the public something he had read not long ago: “In a publication on the recent Los Angeles riots (1992), the looters were described as ‘alternative shoppers.’” [more laughter]
Jay McInerney concluded the evening by recalling the way critics punished him for the success of his first novel, the bestseller that brought him fame: “They did not like it. My fame, though, was limited to bookstores and bars where I was recognized.” He was alluding to his renown as a connoisseur of fine wines who enjoyed tasting as much as writing books about their vintage years.
Jerome Charyn
The wild city nightlife of the eighties coexisted with another fast and furious New York: Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the battlefield of gang violence, as seen in War Cries over Avenue C, the title of a novel by the prolific author Jerome Charyn. A native of the Bronx, familiar with the local mafias ready to defend their turf, he was at the Village Voice on May 7, 1997, to launch his latest novel, El Bronx.8
A tall, lanky man, somewhat aloof, with an ironic smile, Charyn divided his time between New York City and Paris where he taught film studies at the American University. At an earlier reading, he admitted to us that he didn’t feel much like an American: “I don’t go for America’s set of values, materialism and all that, but I don’t want either to be only an alien.”9
Indeed, he had kept a certain distance from the American literary community in Paris, and remained firmly attached to his Big Apple city, New York, the preferred setting of many of his books. Yet he acknowledged that his novels were better understood in France and Europe than in America, stressing that his artistic sensitivity was closer to that of Russian writers such as Dostoevsky or Isaac Babel, the latter the subject of one of his literary biographies.
The author of an enormous output of fiction, short stories, and nonfiction, Charyn was best known for his novels in which “mafias—Cuban, Jewish, Latinos—fight against one another, their only code of conduct being that ‘murder is business and business is murder.’”10 There are lots of cops and robbers in his books, but he disagreed that they were crime novels: “For one thing,” he stressed, “there is no plot; they are novels in which chaos and energy are crossing.”11
At his presentation of El Bronx, he was introduced by Daniel Gunn, a Beckett scholar who pinpointed the tension in Charyn’s style: “It’s the music of your language, its energy that carries the novel,” he noted, addressing the author. “Yours is not a literary language; there is so much slang in it, but language exists by itself.”
To illustrate this remark, the author read an excerpt from this work, giving us a taste of his style that captures the swift movement of a confrontation between two gangs: “[They] are ready to fight. The fight happens; they look like marionettes from the distance, and then an extraordinary ballet of fists and legs; gone in thirty seconds. But the police are arriving: a hundred guys with riot control robots which, of course, precipitate another war. But now there are guns on the roofs of the cars, fights and guys arrested.” It’s a visual dance performance with the high energy of a West Side Story ballet.
The Bronx, this place where he grew up, was a Russian town in the 1940s with its “Jewish gangster culture . . . people coming and going, a population on the road. It was a place of poverty and poor education,” he explained, “but there was something interesting here: being poor was an education—you had to return to where you came from and give back what you had received. This is how many Russian Jews became teachers, doctors, lawyers serving the community.”
Richard Price
While Jerome Charyn enjoys describing the aesthetics of a gang in movement, in his bestseller Clockers,12 presented at the Village Voice on October 22, 1993, Richard Price takes his reader to the very heart of a city evocative of “the Bronx,”13 and even into the thick of the harsh and violent realities of a population adrift. Price told us that he had just spent three years living in a particularly tough neighborhood in Jersey City, New Jersey (called “Dempsey” in his novel), getting to know young men who used to hang out day and night selling drugs on the sly (mostly cocaine) and, thus, getting connected with their families and local police officers.
He read an excerpt detailing the arrest of one such young man suspected of trafficking drugs and, possibly, committing a murder. We can visualize the thorough body search, the invectives of the police, and the crowd around encouraging the would-be offender: “‘Fight the power, fight the power.’ The mother of the kid arrives, all tears, screaming, defending her boy. The kid is embarked to the precinct to be placed under lock. The cops write their stuff.”14 In this dramatic scene, everyone takes part in what the author describes as “disrespect”: “the cop disrespects the kid, the kid disrespects the cop, the family and friends disrespect the police, the police disrespect them, everything is ‘dis’ and you’ve got to play your part. And the cop concludes, ‘We all did what we had to do’ . . . and life goes on.”
Price’s decision to live three years in a rough and dangerous part of New Jersey intrigued the audience. The first few questions innocently, but perhaps justifiably, focused on him, his own fears, and even threats to his life.
Q: “Did you feel that you were taking risks?”
Price: “I’m too cowardly for that, but sometimes ambition is greater than cowardice. In going out with drug dealers and with cops, I had a good strategy: whether I was walking in the Valley of Death, I was doing it with the guy who was the scariest of them all and, by the way, I was introduced to him by the cop himself. He was out of jail after he bought his release by giving out the name of the person he was getting the drugs from.”
Q: “Nobody feared that you might be spying on them?”
Price: “I didn’t want anybody to be paranoid or to hustle. From the start, people knew what I was doing. I told everybody—drug dealers, police, whomever—that I was writing a book. I was not a journalist and didn’t look for information. I simply wanted to know how they lived day by day, made it through the day and how they survived. I just wanted to hang out.”
Q: “How come this explosive mix of population agreed to be so closely observed and followed?”
Price: “‘I’ll pay you,’ I said. ‘I’m a writer. I’ll make money from this book. To the kids, I would add, ‘You’re my research assistant’ and to the cops, “You’re my research associate.’ Some people wouldn’t take the money. They mainly wanted to talk, to blow their whistle, wanted some credit for participating in my project. For each favor, I tried to return it: I got a job for a kid; two other kids spent a summer with my family.”
Q: “You never got caught in the crossfire between opposite camps or in a brush with death?”
Price: “Everyone is in it, and everyone needs each other. It’s not when the guy is in jail that he’ll give information. It’s not a black and white picture, but more like in-between gray.”
James Ellroy
The East Coast’s New York City has its metropolis twin on the West Coast: Los Angeles, the “Movie Land, Hollywood and the Great American Dream Culture”15 that has inspired many a writer.
Yet for James Ellroy, the celebrated author of political thrillers and suspense novels, this city of angels is not a dream, but rather a nightmare, and not just a setting, but a character—the ghost of his mother who had been raped and savagely murdered when he was a ten-year-old boy. He was to remain haunted by her story for the rest of his life.
On the chilly afternoon of April 19, 1995, Ellroy entered the Village Voice in a flowery Hawaiian shirt to talk about American Tabloid,16 his eleventh novel and first volume of his Underworld USA trilogy, set in the arcane world of politics and crime during the Kennedy years. Tall, slender, and slightly stooped, sitting on the corner of a small table covered with piles of his books, he stared at his audience with piercing eyes behind thick glasses, and with a half-amused, half-cynical grin, called us: “the best-looking room . . . of degenerates,”—pause—“the last Clinton cabinet meeting.”—giggling. How many of you here speak English?” he asked. Everyone raised a hand. Then he quipped, “You’re fucked. I speak only my own LA patois and beatnik.”
The tone was set for the reading, yet he kept his public in good spirits. Ellroy seemed to be raving. However, it was still a lot of fun listening to this elusive star talk nonsense. He started with “American Tabloid is my new masterpiece structure between my previous masterpieces and my masterpieces to come . . . a fucking novel: the truth of history is in fiction . . . I don’t read, I think, I browse, I spin all this stuff, shift it in my head.” “It’s Barko,” he went on, pointing to his bull terrier sitting at his feet (conspicuously absent), “who has written every one of my novels, channeled them in me. Barko, the heterosexual, the lover of most auspicious women,” he added, providing a list of celebrity names. We soon realized that the author was not going to change his tune and, offended by his foul language, a few women started to walk out. Listening to the recording later on, I realized there was little I could salvage and nothing about the novel itself. There was only his absurdist sketch rendered as a live tabloid, a burlesque comedy of the political crimes and intrigues at the highest levels of state power, as portrayed in his novel.
In the end, enthralled by the author’s disruptive yet highly entertaining talk, customers pressed around him to have their copies signed. Later on, expressing the ambivalent mood that prevailed throughout this odd reading, a friend confided to me: “I remember seeing my smiling face on a photo taken when he was signing my copy of his book, but I was devastated inside.”
James Ellroy, Village Voice Bookshop reading, April 19, 1995. © C. Deudon