SOURCE: "Solutions to Dissolution," in Times Literary Supplement, May 24, 1985, p. 572.

In the following excerpt, Kaveney offers praise for Bright Lights, Big City.

The urban unease that these novels depict has in them its artistic equivalent, a sense of less than absolute commitment to technical strategies adopted. The novel has traditionally celebrated community; can its traditional mechanisms be as readily applied to the corruption or disappearance, in the modern American city, of any participation in a common social existence? The narrative perversities of Jay McInerney, Gloria Naylor's frequent descents into the barn-storming of melodrama and soap opera, the insecurity which causes Dyan Sheldon constantly to over-egg her stylistic pudding—these serious flaws in three otherwise admirable books point to a sense that traditional fictions might not be ideally suited to the depiction of contemporary urban life, but just the best solution that comes readily to these authors' hands.

McInerney's...