"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.... 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.... Somewhere back there you could have cut your losses, but you rode past that moment on a comet trail of white powder and now you are trying to hang on to the rush."

Thus begins the downward spiral of the unnamed narrator in Jay McInerney's first novel, Bright Lights, Big City. Utilizing a second-person narrative, McInerney emphasizes just how disillusioned and removed from himself the narrator is as he struggles to deal with the loss of his model wife, his cocaine addiction, a...