By hello
Passage cue: In Bright Lights, Big City, late-night Manhattan repeatedly routes its narrator through The Odeon; the link became so fixed in the book's public image that the restaurant's exterior appeared on the first edition cover. (en.wikipedia.org) Why it matters: McInerney uses a real downtown brasserie as a social password. The Odeon is not just a backdrop for eating and drinking; it condenses the novel's glamour, drift, exhaustion, and status anxiety into one instantly legible room. That reading is an inference from the novel's documented use of the restaurant and McInerney's own later remembrance of it. (en.wikipedia.org)