“You insert another piece of paper, again you type the date. Wizard, please get me the hell out of here! Sorry, life isn’t a cartoon – you will have to find your own way out. Ha! A common wish, particularly among young adults, to be saved from the need to do a nine to five pressure cooker job. Wizard!” And the wizard, on the other end of the time warp, would wave his wand and rescue the hapless turtle.” At the last minute, when he was stretched out under the guillotine, he would cry out, “Help, Mr. The turtle would journey back to say, the French revolution, inevitably getting in way over his head. “There was a cartoon you used to watch with a time-traveling turtle and a benevolent wizard. Both of these worlds – the clock-driven, drab, humdrum office and the blaring girls-girls-girls sleaze – are exactly what the narrator in his current anguished state does not need. Maybe tell Clara you stopped to take a free look at Kinky Karla and got bitten by her snake.”Ĭlara is the narrator’s boss at the fact finding department Kinky Karla and her snake one of the thrills the old street hawkers hawk out on the street. You’ve worn out the line about the subway breaking down.

I can appreciate how many dislike the novel and the whining, distressed voice of the narrator since, in many respects, his emotional turmoil is similar to that other sensitive, distraught, whining 16-year old back in the late 1940s – Holden Caulfield in J. The narrator’s words foreshadow how he really isn’t after the thrills of the hip scene but something emotionally deeper and much more personal.

“I could use one of those right over my heart,” you say.” She takes this as a compliment and thanks you. “The girl with the shaved head has a scar tattooed on her scalp. However, to say specifically why this is so would be to say too much since the more complete story of what the narrator is going through is not disclosed until the closing chapters.īelow are my comments coupled with one-line snappers from the novel’s main character, a 24-year old coke-snorting would-be writer working as a fact-checker for a New Yorker-like magazine and living in a downtown apartment by himself after Amanda, his fashion model wife, called telling him she isn’t coming back and he will be hearing from her lawyer to settle the divorce: But, alas, this is merely the surface.Įach time I read this book, I comprehend more clearly how the words on every page have sharp razor-like edges that cut into the heart of the narrator. The need the Bolivian Marching Powder.” Quote from the opening scene of this 1984 Jay McInerney novel told in cool, hip, drug-hyped second person. There are holes in their boots and they are hungry. They are tired and muddy from their long march through the night. “Your brain at this moment is composed of brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers.

Mcinerney bright lights big city