Lange Samenvatting
Jay McInerney, Story of my life. Uitgeverij Vintage Books,
New York, 1988,1989
THE STORY OF MY LIFE
By Jay McInerney. Our first year in New York it was great, there were always guys around to pick up the tabs, and I'd just sold my Alfa for cash when I moved from Virginia, plus Jeannie had all the major credit cards. I admit we abused them a little. Jeannie's AmEx card was practically transparent it had been run through the little machine so many times. That was our idea of exercise, the gold-card press. Back and forth. So then her old man canceled all the plastic and cut her down to fifteen hundred a month, which is, like, what does he want her to do, start selling her body?'' That's Alison Poole talking - Jay McInerney's new heroine, a ''postmodern girl,'' as her boyfriend calls her, who inhabits the hip New York world of late-night clubs and restaurants. Where the young magazine fact checker in ''Bright Lights, Big City'' merely visited this world, Alison, her roommate Jeannie and their friends are full-time residents here. Almost none of them has ever held a job. They spend their nights at places like Nell's or Raoul's or the Surf Club and their days going to tanning salons and recovering from the nights before. Cocaine and casual sex are their two obsessions; money to finance their pleasures is a constant preoccupation. While everyone has difficulty paying the rent and phone bills, there always seems to be enough cash around to score some coke, buy a new Chanel suit or hire a limousine. Alison talks to us in a relentlessly casual patois that's presumably meant to echo Holden Caulfield's idiosyncratic speech, several generations removed. She punctuates her sentences with asides like ''if you really want to know'' and such ''Saturday Night Live'' catch phrases as ''I'm out of here'' and ''isn't that special.'' Like Holden, Alison suffers a breakdown of sorts (though, in her case, it's been chemically induced); and like Holden, she's obsessed with the phoniness of other people. She and her friends like to play a wicked party game called ''Truth or Dare,'' which basically amounts to answering impolite questions about one's sexual history. And she's constantly admonishing everyone she knows to be completely honest. ''I've grown up around liars and cheaters,'' she tells a man she's just met, ''and I don't think there's any excuse for not telling the truth. I want to be able to trust you, but if I don't think you respect the truth, you know, then I'll just hit the road.'' Yet for all her insistence on honesty, Alison has a serious problem with moral scruples. When she needs money for her acting classes, she lies to a man she's dated, telling him she's pregnant and needs $1,000 for an abortion - money she supplements by making ''a little withdrawal'' from her new boyfriend's wallet. Most of her friends share this curious code of ethics: one of them routinely borrows credit cards from men; another puts Nair hair remover in a roommate's mascara; and they all casually use access codes to surreptitiously monitor one another's phone messages. In many ways, these jaded young narcissists (Alison is 20 when we first meet her) are slightly older versions of the burned-out teen-agers in Bret Easton Ellis's ''Less Than Zero.'' They, too, attribute their woes to their wealthy parents's lack of concern; and they, too, view the world through cynical, weary eyes. Most of Alison's observations, in fact, consist of glib putdowns of other people. She notes that her friend Francesca's ''ambition in life is to get invited to Mick and Jerry's house for dinner;'' that a rival for her boyfriend's attentions is ''only a little less articulate than Sylvester Stallone;'' that ''a secure future'' with her roommate's fiance is ''like two weeks in Philadelphia except longer.'' No doubt the reader is supposed to see Alison's flippancy as a defense mechanism, as a desperate attempt to cover over her own unhappiness and fears. Unfortunately, we never believe in her vulnerability, never even like her. She has none of Holly Golightly's waifish, desperate charm, none of the self-deprecating good humor of Mr. McInerney's earlier heroes. She just seems like another bitter and self-deluding hedonist, adrift in a glitzy world - a spoiled princess, who's as careless with her own life as she is with the feelings of others. One of the problems is that Mr. McInerney appears to want both to sensationalize and to censure Alison's life style, and in doing so, he ends up patronizing his heroine. He's constantly underscoring her ignorance: her boyfriend has to tell her what certain words like ''unalloyed'' mean; and though Alison talks of wanting to be a serious actress, she's more familiar with soap operas than the work of Shakespeare or O'Neill. Indeed, Alison and her pals - who dither on endlessly, like adolescent ninnies, about clothes, makeup and their boyfriends' sexual endowments - all seem less like believable women than like a man's paranoid, cartoonlike idea of what such females might be. Mr. McInerney's earlier novels (''Bright Lights, Big City'' and ''Ransom'') attested to his playful sense of humor, his observant, well-trained eye; and ''Story of My Life'' once again demonstrates his gift for capturing the clever banter that passes for conversation among the knowing young. There are some quick, funny portraits of club denizens in this volume, and some satiric renditions of the stoned dialogue that can accompany the ingestion of chemical substances. In the end, though, none of this makes us care about Mr. McInerney's characters. It simply leaves us depressed at the shallowness of these people's lives, and at the author's failure to find a worthy showcase for his talents. Verwerkingsopdracht nr. 1 * Waarom zei je tegen Skip (je ex) dat je zwanger was? - Mijn vader zou lesgeld voor mijn drama lessen opsturen, maar na een paar maanden had hij dat nog niet gedaan. Later wil ik een beroemde actrice worden en ik wil dus naar mijn drama lessen kunnen gaan. Omdat mijn vader met een of andere jonge slet (ze is zelfs nog jonger dan mij!) ergens ver weg was, en haar net een nieuwe auto had gekocht, had hij denk ik geen geld meer. Bovendien kon ik hem helemaal niet bereiken. En toen ik dat wél kon, beloofde hij me dat hij een cheque zou opsturen. Niet dus…. Vandaar dat ik tegen Skip heb gezegd dat ik zwanger was van hem en dat ik 1000 dollar van hem wilde om een abortus te laten plegen, wat dus helemaal niet waar is. * Wat vond je ervan dat Didi zich eindelijk liet behandelen voor haar drugsverslaving? - Ik had niet verwacht dat het Philip (de neef van Didi) zou lukken om haar te laten behandelen, maar het lukte hem wel, ze ging naar therapie, maar ze zag er wel slechter uit als anders. De jongens werden niet meer zo gek als ze langskwam dan normaal. Ze kwam ook niet meer in de verleiding om wel drugs te gebruiken, als wij bijvoorbeeld iets zaten te snuiven zei ze dat het slecht voor ons was en dat zei er nooit meer aan zou beginnen * Waarom ben je naar bed gegaan met Skip Pendleton, terijl je verkering had met Dean? - Ik was kwaad op hem, hij belde niet meer, en als ik hem belde had hij dat stomme antwoordapparaat aan staan. Toen ik erachter kwam dat hij was vreemdgegaan met Cassie was ik helemaal woedend. Dean vroeg me of ik vreemdgegaan was met het spel “Truth or Dare”. Ik heb een hekel aan liegen dus sprak ik de waarheid. Hij was teleurgesteld in me, en liet nooit meer iets van zich horen. Ik heb er spijt van dat ik dit heb gedaan, want ik ben nog steeds gek op hem, maar waarom mag ik het niet en hij wel?
Verwerkingsopdracht nr. 19
Dit moet je lezen! Het spannende boek over Alison met haar levensverhaal.
Drugs, alcohol, sex, gevoelens, eenzaamheid en vriendschap komen allemaal aan bod. Dit verhaal zou waar gebeurd kunnen zijn, en misschien wel kenmerkend voor jou. Zou de drugs te veel worden voor Alison. En wat gebeurt er als de drugsdealer voor de deur staat omdat haar vriendin niet heeft betaald?
Lees het nu want zo’n verhaal lees je maar één keer!
Ervaringsverslag
Ik koos dit boek omdat drugsverhalen me eigenlijk altijd wel aanspreken. Het kan net zo goed iemand gebeuren die je kent. De schrijver was me nog niet bekend dus het was niet om die reden dat ik dit boek gelezen heb.
De tijd van waarin het verhaal zich afspeelt is denk ik wel belangrijk, want deze problemen zijn echt iets voor de 20e en 21e eeuw en niet de 18e eeuw ofzo. De personen die erin voorkomen, zijn allemaal van die ruigere typetjes die niet snel bang zullen zijn, en erg zelfstandig leven. Ik herken iets van hun karkaters totaal niet in de mijne. Ze leven in een achterbuurt, wat je goed kunt opmerken door de leefstijl die er beschreven word. Het boek wordt in een ik- persoon vertelt, je beleeft alles door de ogen van Alison. Ook de gevoelens weet je alleen van Alison en niet van alle ander personages. Je leeft je helemaal in haar rol in. Achteraf gezien vond ik het boek niet zo heel speciaal, want er gebeurde bijna niks en het ging bijna alleen maar over sex. Wel heb ik nu een redelijk beeld hoe het leven van zo’n meisjes in de achterbuurt eraan toe kan gaan.
Dat er daar bijvoorbeeld ineens een drugsdealer met een mes in zijn hand voor de deur staat omdat Jeanne (een vriendin van Alison) niet betaald heeft voor de drugs.
Deze schrijver schrijft best goed, en het is ook goed te begrijpen. Ik zou best nog wel een boek van hem willen lezen, maar je mag maar één boek van dezelfde schrijver op je lijst zetten.
Achtergrondinformatie
Once the best-known American writer of his generation, novelist Jay McInerney (born 1955) has been
showered with accolades by the media ever since publishing his first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, in 1984. Called "a stunning debut" by the Times Literary Supplement and later made into a major motion picture, it
documented the coming-of-age excesses of New York City life in the 1980s. Subsequent novels also examined
New York life. Now he’s married with children and dividing his time between New York and Tennessee, McInerney has published 6 novels. Recensies “Line for line it’s one of the funniest novels I have ever read Yet add the whole up and it’s hell” –London Review of Books “Quite as brillant as his first, and a lot funnier” –The Sunday Times “More sex and cocaine-fuelled confessions from the Big Appe with yuppie junk bond dealers, brattisch, rich kds and emotional casualties drowning in a hot tub of sex, sin and apathy” -Today
By Jay McInerney. Our first year in New York it was great, there were always guys around to pick up the tabs, and I'd just sold my Alfa for cash when I moved from Virginia, plus Jeannie had all the major credit cards. I admit we abused them a little. Jeannie's AmEx card was practically transparent it had been run through the little machine so many times. That was our idea of exercise, the gold-card press. Back and forth. So then her old man canceled all the plastic and cut her down to fifteen hundred a month, which is, like, what does he want her to do, start selling her body?'' That's Alison Poole talking - Jay McInerney's new heroine, a ''postmodern girl,'' as her boyfriend calls her, who inhabits the hip New York world of late-night clubs and restaurants. Where the young magazine fact checker in ''Bright Lights, Big City'' merely visited this world, Alison, her roommate Jeannie and their friends are full-time residents here. Almost none of them has ever held a job. They spend their nights at places like Nell's or Raoul's or the Surf Club and their days going to tanning salons and recovering from the nights before. Cocaine and casual sex are their two obsessions; money to finance their pleasures is a constant preoccupation. While everyone has difficulty paying the rent and phone bills, there always seems to be enough cash around to score some coke, buy a new Chanel suit or hire a limousine. Alison talks to us in a relentlessly casual patois that's presumably meant to echo Holden Caulfield's idiosyncratic speech, several generations removed. She punctuates her sentences with asides like ''if you really want to know'' and such ''Saturday Night Live'' catch phrases as ''I'm out of here'' and ''isn't that special.'' Like Holden, Alison suffers a breakdown of sorts (though, in her case, it's been chemically induced); and like Holden, she's obsessed with the phoniness of other people. She and her friends like to play a wicked party game called ''Truth or Dare,'' which basically amounts to answering impolite questions about one's sexual history. And she's constantly admonishing everyone she knows to be completely honest. ''I've grown up around liars and cheaters,'' she tells a man she's just met, ''and I don't think there's any excuse for not telling the truth. I want to be able to trust you, but if I don't think you respect the truth, you know, then I'll just hit the road.'' Yet for all her insistence on honesty, Alison has a serious problem with moral scruples. When she needs money for her acting classes, she lies to a man she's dated, telling him she's pregnant and needs $1,000 for an abortion - money she supplements by making ''a little withdrawal'' from her new boyfriend's wallet. Most of her friends share this curious code of ethics: one of them routinely borrows credit cards from men; another puts Nair hair remover in a roommate's mascara; and they all casually use access codes to surreptitiously monitor one another's phone messages. In many ways, these jaded young narcissists (Alison is 20 when we first meet her) are slightly older versions of the burned-out teen-agers in Bret Easton Ellis's ''Less Than Zero.'' They, too, attribute their woes to their wealthy parents's lack of concern; and they, too, view the world through cynical, weary eyes. Most of Alison's observations, in fact, consist of glib putdowns of other people. She notes that her friend Francesca's ''ambition in life is to get invited to Mick and Jerry's house for dinner;'' that a rival for her boyfriend's attentions is ''only a little less articulate than Sylvester Stallone;'' that ''a secure future'' with her roommate's fiance is ''like two weeks in Philadelphia except longer.'' No doubt the reader is supposed to see Alison's flippancy as a defense mechanism, as a desperate attempt to cover over her own unhappiness and fears. Unfortunately, we never believe in her vulnerability, never even like her. She has none of Holly Golightly's waifish, desperate charm, none of the self-deprecating good humor of Mr. McInerney's earlier heroes. She just seems like another bitter and self-deluding hedonist, adrift in a glitzy world - a spoiled princess, who's as careless with her own life as she is with the feelings of others. One of the problems is that Mr. McInerney appears to want both to sensationalize and to censure Alison's life style, and in doing so, he ends up patronizing his heroine. He's constantly underscoring her ignorance: her boyfriend has to tell her what certain words like ''unalloyed'' mean; and though Alison talks of wanting to be a serious actress, she's more familiar with soap operas than the work of Shakespeare or O'Neill. Indeed, Alison and her pals - who dither on endlessly, like adolescent ninnies, about clothes, makeup and their boyfriends' sexual endowments - all seem less like believable women than like a man's paranoid, cartoonlike idea of what such females might be. Mr. McInerney's earlier novels (''Bright Lights, Big City'' and ''Ransom'') attested to his playful sense of humor, his observant, well-trained eye; and ''Story of My Life'' once again demonstrates his gift for capturing the clever banter that passes for conversation among the knowing young. There are some quick, funny portraits of club denizens in this volume, and some satiric renditions of the stoned dialogue that can accompany the ingestion of chemical substances. In the end, though, none of this makes us care about Mr. McInerney's characters. It simply leaves us depressed at the shallowness of these people's lives, and at the author's failure to find a worthy showcase for his talents. Verwerkingsopdracht nr. 1 * Waarom zei je tegen Skip (je ex) dat je zwanger was? - Mijn vader zou lesgeld voor mijn drama lessen opsturen, maar na een paar maanden had hij dat nog niet gedaan. Later wil ik een beroemde actrice worden en ik wil dus naar mijn drama lessen kunnen gaan. Omdat mijn vader met een of andere jonge slet (ze is zelfs nog jonger dan mij!) ergens ver weg was, en haar net een nieuwe auto had gekocht, had hij denk ik geen geld meer. Bovendien kon ik hem helemaal niet bereiken. En toen ik dat wél kon, beloofde hij me dat hij een cheque zou opsturen. Niet dus…. Vandaar dat ik tegen Skip heb gezegd dat ik zwanger was van hem en dat ik 1000 dollar van hem wilde om een abortus te laten plegen, wat dus helemaal niet waar is. * Wat vond je ervan dat Didi zich eindelijk liet behandelen voor haar drugsverslaving? - Ik had niet verwacht dat het Philip (de neef van Didi) zou lukken om haar te laten behandelen, maar het lukte hem wel, ze ging naar therapie, maar ze zag er wel slechter uit als anders. De jongens werden niet meer zo gek als ze langskwam dan normaal. Ze kwam ook niet meer in de verleiding om wel drugs te gebruiken, als wij bijvoorbeeld iets zaten te snuiven zei ze dat het slecht voor ons was en dat zei er nooit meer aan zou beginnen * Waarom ben je naar bed gegaan met Skip Pendleton, terijl je verkering had met Dean? - Ik was kwaad op hem, hij belde niet meer, en als ik hem belde had hij dat stomme antwoordapparaat aan staan. Toen ik erachter kwam dat hij was vreemdgegaan met Cassie was ik helemaal woedend. Dean vroeg me of ik vreemdgegaan was met het spel “Truth or Dare”. Ik heb een hekel aan liegen dus sprak ik de waarheid. Hij was teleurgesteld in me, en liet nooit meer iets van zich horen. Ik heb er spijt van dat ik dit heb gedaan, want ik ben nog steeds gek op hem, maar waarom mag ik het niet en hij wel?
showered with accolades by the media ever since publishing his first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, in 1984. Called "a stunning debut" by the Times Literary Supplement and later made into a major motion picture, it
documented the coming-of-age excesses of New York City life in the 1980s. Subsequent novels also examined
New York life. Now he’s married with children and dividing his time between New York and Tennessee, McInerney has published 6 novels. Recensies “Line for line it’s one of the funniest novels I have ever read Yet add the whole up and it’s hell” –London Review of Books “Quite as brillant as his first, and a lot funnier” –The Sunday Times “More sex and cocaine-fuelled confessions from the Big Appe with yuppie junk bond dealers, brattisch, rich kds and emotional casualties drowning in a hot tub of sex, sin and apathy” -Today
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1 seconde geleden
R.
R.
Heej,
Bedankt dat je dit boekverlag op het internet hebt gezet. Ik heb er goed gebruik van kunnen maken, maar ik moet nog een ding weten en dat is hoeveel bladzijden dit boek heeft: story of my life!!!
22 jaar geleden
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