He's still attached to the 'Big City'
NEW YORK - On a cloudy day in the Meatpacking District, images of the old world - men in bloody aprons, lonely figures with upturned collars walking down by the Hudson - blur into those of the new: freakishly tall blondes who get their spike heels stuck in the cobblestones.
This is Jay McInerney territory. His latest book, "How It Ended: New and Collected Stories," covers several decades in this, his chosen neighborhood, his adopted hometown within a town.
McInerney always has believed in living among the people he writes about - transvestites in the Meatpacking District, fund-raisers on the Upper East Side, heirs in the South, hipsters wasting their lives at West Village clubs.
The research has been intensive and, at times, exhausting. He is on his fourth marriage - he has two children with his third wife, Helen Bransford - and he's not ashamed. "I believed in each one of these marriages," he says. "The conventional view is that I've had three failed marriages. But I believe I've had three successful marriages." ("Expensive," he says, sighing.)
"I was burned out on New York in the 1980s, sick of it in the 1990s," McInerney explains, but the city earned his respect after the 9/11 attacks. "I feel sorry for people who missed it. You really felt part of a community."
McInerney looks out from the roof of Soho House, a lower Manhattan club to which writers gravitate. He likes to come here in the summer, when everyone has left New York.
He's hoping the economic downturn will cleanse New York of investment banker culture, making room for a return of artists and bohemians.
McInerney moved to New York when he was 22, after his mother died. His first novel, "Bright Lights, Big City," was published in 1984. The saga of a young fact checker at a New Yorker-like magazine who spends his nights on club binges, the book was written in second person and seemed to signal a new sensibility in which excess led to a desiccated numbness.
In the ensuing quarter-century, McInerney's career has been a back-and-forth of ambition and retrenchment. Throughout the 1990s, he tried to write "big novels," but he remains known almost entirely for his first book. So long is the shadow of "Bright Lights, Big City" that few people noticed when, in 2006, he actually wrote a novel about human goodness: the post-Sept. 11 book "The Good Life," which takes place in the first three months after the attack.
"I suppose I sympathize with my characters too much," McInerney admits. "I don't find it useful simply to ridicule the people around me. I'm not a coldblooded satirist."
