The Hidden Grief in a Degenerate Novel

Finding unlikely echoes and old weaknesses in Jay McInerney and Kim Stanley Robinson as New York thaws into summer debauchery.

Until recently, I’d been in a weeks-long reading rut and in desperate need of a page turner. This has happened enough times in recent memory that it's hard to imagine I once read a book a week while freelancing as a literary critic. I picked up Josef Frank’s brick biography of Dostoevsky in hopes of breaking my dry spell, but the introduction just made me want to read one of Dostoevsky’s novels so instead I went for Green Earth by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Initially a trilogy, Robinson re-released Green Earth in a single edition, slightly slimmed down but still more than a thousand pages long. (The Dostoevsky bio was a five-part series, also condensed into a thousand plus.)

Published beginning in 2004, Green Earth is about Washington’s inaction around climate change. A vantage of viewpoints offers readers a keyhole view into how science intersects with politics and business. I’ve only completed the first part of the trilogy, but already I’ve glimpsed the bureaucracy behind the National Science Foundation and come to regret my biotech investment.

This book is all plot and big ideas. Sentences are functional, not artful; they solve the problem of how to get the reader from A to B and take the most direct path there, with some romantic padding now and again. It is easy on the eyes and engaging enough, with helpful lamp posts guiding the readers to later reveals. I see the fog receding around certain characters — a talented young mathematician from University of California-San Diego whose research proposal may or may not unlock the next great advancement in medical science, enriching whoever happens to patent the therapy first.

Last month, my Mom and I flew to San Diego to visit my brother. He had just moved there from Tucson where he worked for five years as a wildland firefighter. When I described his job, I liked to say he wasn’t just fighting fire, but history itself. Every season brought record-setting blazes and my brother always seemed to be on the front lines of the next Big Fire.

He was working in Estes Park when Colorado simultaneously had its two largest fires in state history — Cameron Peak and East Troublesome. His second season ended in California fighting the Dixie Fire, and his third season began with New Mexico’s largest blaze, The Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire. Uncontrollable fires were his norm.

This is the world Robinson invited me into on New York’s warmest day thus far this year — a balmy 79 that almost felt like San Diego. It’s a world where the natural terror of my homeland — tornadoes — is appearing in places it doesn’t belong, where climate deniers somehow have equal footing with everyone else, where solutions are studied and not acted upon. It’s a world nearly identical to ours. Though billed as scifi, there’s nothing far fetched about the Science in the Capital trilogy.

I had already made a decent dent when I realized an uncanny parallel. Exactly a year ago, I had started a different book by Robinson — New York 2140 — immediately following my Dad’s passing. At the time, New York 2140 was next on my to-read list and my Dad just happened to have it sitting on his shelf, as if waiting for me. It imagines a world where sea levels have risen 50 feet, but mankind adapts. In New York, lower Manhattan becomes intertidal: subway stations are now bath houses, jet skis replace e-bikes, and speculative real estate finance still has the power to crash the economy. Reading this as I descended into LaGuardia I could see just how fucked the city would be if sea levels rose. LaGuardia itself was half built on water.

Now, one year later, I’m reading a different Robinson book that features San Diego, where my brother had just moved. To be clear, this is not a scientific paper, it is a poetic study of grief’s long, unlikely echo.

I plowed some 500 pages through Green Earth before my enthusiasm started to wane. Shopping around for a longform essay, I found Jay McInerney’s 1994 profile ofChloe Sevigny, who even at 19 years old was the epicenter of cool in New York. The profile is delightful and made me want to go thrifting in Connecticut or the Berkshires — anywhere but New York (“too picked over”). It also made me want to read The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll, which teenage Chloe said was her favorite book, and Bright Lights, Big City, a novel by McInerney that a friend gifted me when I first moved to New York in 2015.

So on Sunday, mildly hungover, I picked up the Vintage Contemporaries edition of Bright Lights that had been sitting on my shelf for nearly a decade. I kept reading until I finished it in bed later that night.

The lithe novel begins and ends at 6am, a liminal hour in New York when the degenerates are crawling home from the club glassy-eyed and the go-getters are hoofing around the park for their morning sweat. It is one of my favorite hours in the city. The streets are near empty and, for once, the jeer of traffic relents to the song of birds.

The protagonist aspires to be one of those morning types — someone who thumbs through the Times with a coffee and croissant, considering which museum exhibit he should see — but he is firmly in the degenerate camp. We’re introduced to him while he’s alone at a club where he doesn’t belong, weighing whether to cut his losses and go home or take one more trip to the bathroom. Marching orders come and off to the bathroom he goes.

This is how much of the novel proceeds, with temptation winning Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and why not Monday. There is no such thing as moderation either. One beer turns into five and doing that first line ignites a night-long carousel in and out of the bathroom until there’s nowhere to go but home. The problem with New York is there’s always somewhere to go.

Spring has finally arrived and I also don’t want to go home after hibernating all winter. With sunlight unfurling and my knee nearly healed, I’m ready to be out and about. I’ve done my time, I told myself, as I ventured out to Rialto, King Tai, and Sharlene’s with a deck of cards, book, and notebook in tow.

That is the danger and delight of summer in the city — an emporium for hanging out, when the days run long and your ConEd bill rewards you for being elsewhere. Summer has always been my favorite season, but this year that might have shifted to winter. I was fairly content to stay in reading, playing scrabble, trying new recipes. I found a good balance for someone with extreme tendencies. I’ve always been a morning person, but now I want to be a wintry one too.

Despite the inevitable comedown and the clear indictment of the night demon lifestyle, Bright Lights, Big City aggravated my itch to return to the arena. Over the course of a week, the protagonist’s seemingly charmed life rapidly unravels — he loses his fact-checking job at a prestigious magazine, a position he envisaged as the first rung to literary fame; pisses himself at the home of a colleague who is way too nice to him; gets kicked out of a runway show he snuck into with false press credentials to spy on his ex-wife, a model who went to Europe for a shoot and never came back. “She called up from France one day and said she wasn’t coming home.”

We’re led to believe this recent divorce is the cause of the protagonist’s self-destruction, but the real reason, I think, is revealed on page 157. Here comes the echo, which is also a spoiler. You’ve been warned. (It’s worth noting the entire novel is written in the second-person: “It’s six a.m. Do you know where you are?”)

One year ago, the protagonist’s mother died from cancer. It’s a fact he won’t even admit to himself and the reader only encounters it via his younger brother, who has come to retrieve his elder sibling and take him home to Bucks County to spread her ashes.

They fight, make up, get drunk together. The protagonist picks up another bag. He wants to keep going, keep talking, but his brother falls asleep as he cuts up a few lines.

Flashback to his mother’s last night where he sits bedside, having volunteered for the night shift. This scene reveals a different side of our protagonist, sort of. We see him caring for someone else, proving he’s capable of something other than self-loathing. The conversation with his mother, however, reveals more of the same, but in a different light. “Have you ever tried cocaine?” his dying mother asks. “Have you slept with a lot of girls?”

He’s quick to offer her morphine whenever she winces, but she demurs — she wants to be clear-headed in these final moments.

Clear-headed — that must be a symptom when death is imminent. Grief, on the other hand, lends itself to numbing, which only serves to fog the mind and heart. When your loved one is gone, sometimes all that’s left to hold is pain. Yes drugs can help get rid of the pain, but they also erode what that pain represents: your beloved.

These echoes are faint and distant, perhaps only legible to me. I don’t know that I’ve adequately described them, but I don’t really care to. I’m wary of looking too closely. I’d rather feel them — that way it’s easier to mistake them for a heartbeat.