Gawker points out that Random House is updating the cover of the classic fact-checking-and-drugs novel of the 1980s, Bright Lights, Big City. I read Jay McInerney's book about six months after I'd started my first job out of college, as the sole fact-checker at National Journal, and while certain set-pieces of the novel resonated with me, and I envied the main character for the support network he had, and wasted, at his fact-checking gig at the thinly fictionalized New Yorker. But three years and a job removed from the subject matter, I'm not entirely sure how well the book holds up as a portrait of journalism.
The idea that you could float through a fact-checking job at an elite magazine seems entirely impossible today. It's not just that the standards for accuracy remain high (it remains something I'm sort of goofily proud of that I identified a factual error in a New Yorker story), but that my sense is that good fact-checking departments are often a breeding ground for ambitious young writers and reporters. There are career fact-checkers these days, but my sense is that there are fewer of them. If someone doesn't really want to be a fact-checker, it's pretty easy to replace them: the contraction of journalism as a whole means competition is fiercer. And people really are trying to move up more quickly: the new managing editor at the New Yorker is a 26-year-old former fact-checker. So it's not just that the jobs are more competitive, but the guild of fact-checkers is much more fluid.
I do think Bright Lights, Big City captures the loneliness of trying to find one's place in a new city, no matter what you do, or who you love:
Once upon a time, you assumed you were very likable. That you had an attractive wife and a fairly interesting job seemed only your due....After you met Amanda and came to New York, you began to feel that you were no longer on the outside looking in. When you were growing up you suspected that everyone else had been let in on some fundamental secret which was kept from you. Others seemed to know what they were doing...Not until you reached up college, where everyone started fresh, did you begin to pick up the tricks of winning friends and influencing people. Although you became adept, you also felt that you were exercising an acquired skill, something that came naturally to others. you succeeded in faking everyone out, and never quite lost the fear that you would eventually be discovered a fraud, an impostor in the social circle. Which is just about how you feel these days.
That's ultimately the power of the book, even though the novel relies heavily on cliches like the magazine and coke scene in New York for its individuality. On its 25th birthday, Bright Lights, Big City is both an anachronism, and an uneven if deeply felt portrait of youth. It doesn't really matter that the Twin Towers are gone from the cover: the setting may be what got the book its reputation in the first place, but it ultimately doesn't really matter.