All Dreamed Out

Acutely aware of his many options in the New York City night, Taylor Plimpton, 34, recounts his experiences as a regular in the Manhattan nightclub scene when he was in his twenties. Though this debut has been compared to Bright Lights, Big City (1984), whose author, Jay McInerney, contributes a blurb, Plimpton's book is a memoir, not fiction, and he comes across as more vulnerable and less hip than McInerney's narrator.

Plimpton's New York, though mainly limited to the West Side clubs where he spent most of his nights, is "this city of endless possibilities and movement, all of it pulsating around you." If this sounds a bit true, it's because so many books have been written about New York in the same vein, but Plimpton makes us feel that pulsation and puts the stamp of his generation on the city, much as F. Scott Fitzgerald did for This Side of Paradise, the debut novel that made him famous in 1920.

Compressing thousands of nights out clubbing into one typical foray from late evening to early morning, Plimpton shows his stuff as a stylish writer, the true son of George Plimpton, to whom Notes is dedicated and whose name "Tap" reluctantly drops [End Page 14 ] to get into an exclusive club. Though the book's title nicely alliterates, the memoir is less "notes" than carefully plotted chapters, each a well-constructed essay addressed to a portion of the night, from the day before to the morning after, and as a while, they form a narrative arc, from anticipation to fulfillment, innocence to experience, or recovery to splurge to hangover to recovery. Nevertheless, the tone of the book turns elegiac toward the end as Plimpton senses that he has come of age and must leave nightly clubbing behind: "what scares me [is] that to be a healthy person, I'll have to give up the night, all its endless wonders and possibilities.... Love affairs with the night rarely last long."

It's possible that he'll also give up his best friend and mentor, Zoo, the Dean Moriarty to Plimpton's Sal Paradise. Zoo is a master at jumping lines and gaining entrance to exclusive clubs and generally excels at getting over to advance himself. We've all known a Zoo, who fascinated us when young but whose charisma dimmed when we grew up, and he is probably more charming to Plimpton than he will be to some readers.

Plimpton's carefully wrought syntax and extended sentences offer pleasure to the reader who might otherwise lose patience with the author's self-indulgent life. In one such sentence, in the marvelous chapter "Dancing: A Self-Conscious White Man's Guide," the author describes grooving on a dance floor crammed like a tin of sardines, his gerunds both providing cohesion over its roughly 400-word course and imitating the kinetic charge of the dancers: "moving," "sweating," "swinging," "dancing," "flashing," "spinning," "rumbling," "thrusting," in order "to finally lose yourself in something bigger, this ancient, communal beast of the dance." Paradoxically, "it's moments like these, when I lose myself, that I somehow stumble across my real self, the ridiculous me with the goofy grin...."

While Plimpton writes compellingly of his immersion in the night, a false note sounds when he turns to romance. Early on, he has noticed at the clubs he frequents pretty, even gorgeous "members of the fairer sex," who seem idealizations of the sort that show their flesh in lads' magazines, but in the penultimate chapter, he fumbles his chance at hooking up with a "beautiful bodhisattva" from Colorado(!), who must leave the city for home in the morning. As the night wanes and her departure nears, Plimpton shifts to the second person, à la McInerney, and writes, "You want to hug her, or kiss her, or tackle her or something." The reader, however, might recall feeling other desires in such a situation.

A sometimes goofy, often eloquent knight errant on a nighttime quest for self-knowledge, Plimpton ends his nocturnal peregrinations feeling "all dreamed out." But Notes from the Night offers enough promise to keep us on the alert for his next book, a memoir about life with his father.