SOURCE: "Cultural/Familial Estrangement: Self-Exile and Self-Destruction in Jay McInerney's Novels," in The Literature of Emigration and Exile, edited by James Whitlark and Wendell Aycock, Texas Tech University Press, 1992, pp. 115-30.

In the following essay, Faye examines the themes of "cultural disaffection," alienation, and expatriation in Bright Lights, Big City, Ransom, and Story of My Life. According to Faye, "Each novel may be considered a bildungsroman whose action revolves around a familial betrayal as it drives the main character to reject not only relatives, but self."

According to Malcolm Bradbury's The Expatriate Tradition in American Literature, fictional expatriation is a response to "a familiar American complaint about cultural barrenness, 'absence of forms,' the need for another culture…." He describes expatriation not as the act of leaving but as "the desire to take the path of separatism. condemn the nation for culturelessness, materialism, or innocence, the gesture of...