A Man of His Time

By Joel Stein

The 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.

The 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, me sexy?) for the magazine profiles he writes. But McInerney's characters haven't grown up since Bright Lights: instead of going dancing at the Studio 54 successor Limelight, they go to the still newer club, Chaos; instead of doing cocaine, they do ecstasy. Looking great at 43 and still the party boy of the tabloids, the likable McInerney may be the Dick Clark of literature.

Folding his sunglasses on the table in front of him at Balthazar (still the trendiest restaurant in New York City--he hopes, apologizing for the brunch crowd that "couldn't get in at night"), McInerney rebuts the accusation that his life-style has hurt his prose. "There are a lot of people writing about quiet contemplative lives in the Midwest, a lot of people writing about academia and plenty of people writing about the suburbs," he says. "If I taught college in the Midwest, would I be a better writer? Would the world be a better place? I don't think so. Somebody's got to do what I do. It might as well be me." Continuing to complain about his fame, he adds, "I wish it could be like it is in France" (CTRL, Europe).

There may still be an American audience for McInerney's style of social commentary. A musical version of Bright Lights, Big City is scheduled to debut in January at the New York Theater Workshop, which also produced Rent. It opens with dancers popping out of bathroom stalls and singing I Love Drugs: "I love drugs/ And everything they do./ Don't you?/ I do." McInerney says it was the catchy songs that persuaded him to go ahead with the production. "At first I was like, 'Does the world really need this?' But then I heard the music and I said, 'I may be crazy, but this sounds pretty good.'"

McInerney's taste has also, amazingly, remained focused on the dazzle of glamour. This is a guy who's been married to a model and has lived with two others, and it still isn't out of his system. "I think for the moment I've exhausted my observations of it," he admits. "But the day I overcome my spectator's interest in beauty, I think I'd better take my pulse and go to bed."

One of the models he lived with was Marla Hanson, who in 1986 was slashed so violently across the face by thugs hired by her angry landlord that she required 50 stitches. The model who lives with the main character in Model Behavior is persistently threatened by a woman with a boxcutter. McInerney says he hasn't shown Hanson the book yet and doesn't know if she read the New Yorker short story it grew out of, because they don't speak that often. "I don't think she'd dislike the book," he says. "But it's not something I can afford to think about when I'm writing."

Bret Easton Ellis, author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho and a longtime McInerney buddy, doesn't seem too worried about the feelings of models either. His next book, Glamorama, due out this winter, is a screed against models and celebrity. McInerney says the passages he has read are dark, something he avoided. "I deliberately wrote a comic novel because you don't go chasing butterflies with sledgehammers," he says.

Similarly, there is no reason to mock McInerney for only smelling the surface of the Zeitgeist this time. Sure, he's missed the facts that restaurants have replaced clubs, that ostentatious wealth is being spent inside the home and that even for most celebrities, late-night partying has ceased to be cool. And, yes, it is a little sad when the hostess at Balthazar doesn't even know how to pronounce his last name. But why use a sledgehammer? Somebody's got to chronicle what's going on with the druggies and clubbers. Why not him?