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When Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City was published in 1984, it took the publishing world by storm and ushered in a new era of edgy young writers.  Bright Lights, Big City chronicles the emotional, psychological, and spiritual downward spiral of a young would-be writer in the fast-lane of the mid 1980’s Manhattan club scene.  His wife has left him, his job oppresses him, and he lives in a cocaine-addled twilight zone.  The first chapter, entitled “It’s 6 AM, Do You Know Where You Are?” begins:

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.  But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy.  You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head.  The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge.  All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder.  Then again, it might not.  A small voice in side you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is a result of too much of that already.

Confessional stories about people on the descent, whether into madness, depression, dissipation, alcoholism, or any other form of self-destruction are a genre unto themselves that was not invented by McInerney.  In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield tells us about his own drive toward that cliff he hopes to protect all the children. In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood descends into suicidal depression.  In John O’Brien’s Leaving Las Vegas, Ben Sanderson literally drinks himself to death.

What makes McInerney’s novel so unique both then and now is that it is entirely written in second person.  “You,” the reader, are character in the story.  It is a testament to McInerney’s talent that he wrote a whole book in this unusual still and managed to pull it off.  I am as amazed by it now as I was when I first read it.

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In 1960, Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus won the National Book Award.  The title story of the collection is a novella that tells of the doomed romance between Neil Klugman, a recent class college graduate who works in a library and lives in a working class neighborhood in Newark, and Brenda Patimkin, a Radcliff student from an affluent family.  The differences in class, family pressures and the two young lovers slowly forming adult identities cause the relationship to fall apart.  It was one of the first books that formed what I call “The Twenty-Something Genre.”

Seven years later, Mike Nichols turned Charles Webb’s novel The Graduate into a blockbuster movie starring a very young Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock, a young college graduate who is seduced and corrupted by the wife of his father’s law partner, the infamous Mrs. Robinson, played deliciously by Anne Bancroft.  The film captures 1960’s affluent society’s shallowness, best summed up in this memorable exchange:

Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Benjamin: Just how do you mean that, sir?

What one word might a contemporary Mr. McGuire whisper to Benjamin? “Derivatives”?

In the end, Ben finds redemption in the love of Elaine, Mrs. Robinson’s daughter and in the final scene we see them escaping on a city bus.  They may be free, but their future is still uncertain as revealed by the uncomfortable expressions on their faces.  As much as we want them to, I can’t actually picture them staying together.

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I have always been envious of writers who are able to effectively render the natural world.  I grew up in the city so in some sense, nature is a foreign land to me.  It is, however, a foreign land in which I have traveled.  As a boy, I was a member of Boy Scout Troop 17 in Elmhurst, Queens.  There were camping trips every month throughout the year, two weeks of summer camp in July, and a special “long trip” in August where each year we went on an extended cross-country road trip.  In August of 1972, I hiked Mount Washington in New Hampshire, navigated the rapids of the Penobscot River in Maine, hiked along the rocky shores in Acadia National Park, and did traditional New England style Cod fishing in Nova Scotia (making Captains Courageous, a very enjoyable read in school the following fall). 1973 was a grand tour of the west including a backpacking trip through the Grand Canyon, mountain climbing in The Grand Tetons, and canoeing in Missouri.  1974 was a trip to Arkansas for a multi-day canoeing the beautiful Buffalo River.  Years later when the Clinton Whitewater scandal erupted, I actually knew where the place was.

These experiences stimulated all my city-boy senses senses and whenever I read a piece of writing that effectively captures them, I am transported back to those places in my memory.  Some of these places have shown up in my writing.  My young couple in “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” spend a night camping in Acadia National Park. Another couple hike up to Indian Cliffs in Ten Mile River Boy Scout Camp, near Narrowsburg, New York in my story “Indian Summer.”  How I end up mixing fictional couples with boy scout memories in stories with romantic themes is perhaps a topic for psycho-analysis.  As my late father might have said, “Boy Scout camp was never like this!”

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My short story, “Come Together,” has been published in issue six of Cantaraville, a PDF published literary journal.  “Come Together” is the second story in a cycle of stories that I began working on several years ago follows two Long Island families from the 1960’s to the present day.  The stories are not autobiographical, but the time and place are familiar to me.  The characters are not based on any real people, but are people I might have known, as if they were older brothers and sisters of friends of mine.  I think of these stories as “false memoir.”  Professor Jeffery Berman, my first creative writing teacher, might call them “really good lying.”  The first story, “Brothers”, is online at The Square Table, the third story has been sent out into the world to find a home, and I have begun the first draft of the fourth story.

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This week at Salon.com, Allen Barra has published a review of a new biography of Flannery O’Connor.  My first encounter with O’Connor was as a freshman English major in college, when I read “A Good Man is Hard to Find” for a short story class.  It was the most shocking thing I had ever read. I think it still is.  In her lecture on the story, the professor included a biographical sketch: O’Connor was from Georgia, she was a Catholic, she had attended the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, she died young, and she was an example of “southern gothic literary tradition.”  You don’t become a freshman English major in college without having developed a taste for literature at an even younger age.  During my own teenage years, with the help of some fine teachers in junior and senior high school, I had been captivated by a diverse set of writers, including Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, Bronte, Wharton, Tennyson, Thoreau, Camus, Hesse,  Vonnegut, Joyce, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald (to name just a few).  What was remarkably absent was Faulkner and any discussion of “Southern Literary Tradition,” in spite of having read “The Glass Menagerie.”  Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” also read for that class completed my introduction, and Faulkner later became one of the authors I studied more in depth for my degree.

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I’ve re-posted these pictures from Stony Brook, NY.  I took them down because there was a dispute over who actually took them, my daughter or my sister.  I wasn’t there at the time, so I can’t say definitively who took them, or if they took turns with the camera, or what.  The birth of a new family feud.

I’ve put them back up, however, because the place has been on my mind lately.  In the late 40’s my grandparents, who lived in a rented apartment in Queens, scraped together enough money to buy a small cottage in Stony Brook, which became their summer home.  When I was growing up in the ’60’s, I spent a good part of each summer with them and I have very fond memories of the place, as do my sisters and my cousins.   I wrote a bit about it in a personal essay about my grandparents.

One of the things that I think is important in a piece of fiction is a strong sense of place.  Whether it be Hemingway’s Paris, or Joyce’s Dublin, placing a reader in a place they can see, taste, feel and smell, is critical creating what John Gardner called “The Fictive Dream.”  It’s necessarily about burying the reader with dense passages of description, it’s about providing just enough to capture the essence of a place and time, using as many of the five senses as possible.

For me, my memories of Stony Brook are particularly vivid and I have been writing a series of stories set there during the time I was growing up.  They’re not really autobiographical; I grew up in Queens and my fictional characters are seem to me to be like people I might have known, but aren’t based on myself or any real person.  The stories are about a family in Port Jefferson, a town near Stony Brook that I actually lived in for a few years as an adult.  The first story, “Brothers,” was published first in Static Movement and again in The Square Table. “Come Together,” the second story will be appearing in a future issue of Cantaraville. I’ve completed a third story, I think the best of the set, that is under consideration for publication next year in a well regarded literary journal (I’m keeping my fingers crossed).  I’ve also begun a fourth story.  The story cycle isn’t something I’m actively working on.  Usually when I finish one story, I have absolutely no idea what happens next.  When it finally comes to me, six months or a year later, I write the next story.

One of these pictures played a role in the writing of one of these stories.  The picture at the top of this article was taken from the fishing pier at the Stony Brook town beach, next to the Stony Brook Yacht Club, and just across the street from the historic Three Village Inn.  That strip of beach on which stands that little green beach house is a place that my grandparents used to take us for cookouts.  It’s located at the end of a road that extends past West Meadow Beach and past some cottages, whose legal status has been questioned for years.  This picture was my desktop background while I was working my third Long Island Story.  I was writing a dramatically tense scene and I needed a break.  There before me was that lovely place that I remembered so well, so I had my characters jump into a convertible on a sunny spring day and drive out to that little green boathouse.  It provided a happy, energetic interlude in an otherwise sad story.

The Gallery.