Word: mcinerney
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Zeitgeist is all in how you look at it. So for Jay McInerney, who spends his time canoodling at New York City parties, cavorting in the Hamptons and consuming media, it's all about models. And sure, models are big, no doubt. But McInerney is looking at the '90s through an '80s lens. Reading him is like listening to a ham-radio operator explain e-mail...
...title novella in McInerney's new book, Model Behavior (Knopf; 275 pages; $24), does make some good jokes about our increasing desire to kowtow to celebrities. Having interviewed a slew of them for magazines, and having been interviewed almost as much himself since his first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, was published in 1984, McInerney knows how generic the whole experience is. The main character in Model Behavior just hits a button on his keypad to produce a paragraph about an actor living in Montana (CTRL, Mont) or a starlet claiming she still thinks of herself as ugly (SHIFT, What...
What a difference a decade makes. Mediagenic writers like Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz once held the limelight with modish novels about fast life in the 1980s. But those authors have now faded into their own material, symbols of the superficialities they exploited in their fiction...
...echoes of big American writers: the strange romanticism of Fitzgerald's class envy; a Faulknerian obsession with slavery's enduring "curse" on the South; stoic, Hemingwayesque suffering amid sexual loss; and--novelists must have some consistency in their concerns--passages of Herculean drug abuse in the manner of Jay McInerney...
...McInerney's acuteness as a social critic remains intact (a late '70s dinner party is said to have taken place "just before spaghetti became pasta"), as does his occasionally tart way with language. Impressive too is the quiet way in which Patrick, the narrator, finally comes to terms with his conflicting drives. There is a surprising modesty here at the end of this clamorous and overreaching book, a frank conservatism that is close to daring in a work of contemporary fiction...