Jay McInerney's latest urban anti-hero is 'still waiting for his adult life to begin.' From the evidence of this book, so is Jay McInerney. MODEL BEHAVIOR: A Novel and 7 Stories

Jay McInerney's latest urban anti-hero is 'still waiting for his adult life to begin.' From the evidence of this book, so is Jay McInerney. MODEL BEHAVIOR: A Novel and 7 Stories

Boy will be boy

Jay McInerney's latest urban anti-hero is 'still waiting for his adult life to begin.' From the evidence of this book, so is Jay McInerney. MODEL BEHAVIOR: A Novel and 7 Stories

Saturday, October 10, 1998

By Jay McInerney

  

Random House, 275 pages, $33.50

'Connor here. Thirty-two and two-thirds years old and not really happy about it. Still waiting for his adult life to begin." So the narrator of Jay Mc-Inerney's sixth novel, Model Behavior , introduces himself and his story of a miserable love affair with a (brainless) model, desperate attempts to save his anorexic sister and a titanic battle with his boss, a callous fashion magazine editor.

No one has ever accused McInerney of an excess of imagination. His last novel, The Last of the Savages , was deconstructed in the pages of Atlantic Monthly when published, and found to be more than somewhat similiar to Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer-winner of '46, All the King's Men . The review was a impressive piece of journalism, which intricately took apart both novels, and showed that plot, subplot, main characters, style, love interests of main characters and even minor characters of All the King's Menwere all updated. To top it all off, McInerney's writing was terrible: clichéd, mind-numbing and just plain lazy -- there being a curious theory going around that plagiarism is okay if the writing is better than in the original.

McInerny protested, saying he had not even read All the King's Men . An independent critic was called in and weighed in on McIn- erny's side, the magazine stood by its review and the matter was forgotten. However, few in the publishing world would disagree that there is more than a hint of hommage to Fitzgerald, Cheever and Wodehouse in his work.

The writing part (not the borrowing part) was surprising because McInerney is held to be a masterful stylist, though clearly only as long as he is writing in his own voice about the world he inhabits. Which is what he does in Model Behavior ,wherein he rehashes the worst days of his gilded life, during which he was dumped by a model he met in Japan and fired from a magazine for not being guileful or dumb enough, and took enough drugs to make a jailbird out of himself. The novel is an eerie replay of his first hit novel, Bright Lights, Big City ,except that the narrator has put on about five years (McInerney has put on 15), there is a larger than usual round-up of pathetic extra-sensitive and/or extremely callous women about whom he obsesses, and a whack of alcohol. The self-congratulatory tone is the same, there is a narcissistic self-destructive best friend, the farcical, yet leaden sophomoric ending is similar, and there is a merciful leavening of humour. McInerney's con- tention seems to be that miserable childhoods make these people want to spend their time frittering away their beauty and energy. But it's not good enough. There are millions of people with unhappy childhoods who live good, decent lives and never even see a tab of ecstacy or a Marc Jacobs dress.

Nevertheless, the reader in search of an afternoon slightly less benumbing than a day with Bazaar or Vogue will receive a decent amount of pleasure for his $33.50. McInerney's great gift is that he is a self-conscious, privileged, well-educated, literate egomaniac who -- and this is a massively undervalued gift -- always knows where the best new Manhattan nightclub south of 14th Street is. He then, doggedly, goes to it. Which means we don't have to. His reporting seems accurate enough, the pleasures as shallow and sickening as we suspect.

McInerney has an absolutely seductive satirical voice, and while sometimes (particularly in the seven short stories that accompany the novel) it falls flat, the ideas are too thin and the characters too dimly imagined, much of the time one is extremely grateful that someone somewhere is challenging the stranglehold celebrities, models and frocks seem to have on our culture. Regrettably, having the requisite major ego that his tinselled life requires means he keeps trying for greatness. Perhaps if he stopped trying, he'd reach it.