How It Begins

Some wines are oaky, some cough syrups mediciney; Jay McInerney's writing is zeitgeisty. "He laid out four identical lines with his Soho House membership card ..." begins a sentence that brought me up most short from his How It Ended: New and Collected Stories. This from the man recently compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald by the editor—a critic I otherwise revere—of the New York Times Book Review? Fitzgerald is a glory of the English language; McInerney is the John Marquand for a new American ruling class. His stories are populated by stockjobbers, star litigators, and the floating detritus of showbiz and the international rich—adepts in the competition that is a free agent society. They sense they are the victors and wear their sense of victory like an Elizabethan ruff. But the perimeter of the winner's circle is never fully secure. They long for what Marquand, the New England WASP, found confining; a small world, with its clubbiness and intimacy, to assert itself, finally, against the heartlessness and anonymity of the new power elitism. And it never does.

-Stephen Metcalf

I enjoy Jay McInerney, and his short story "Smoke" from the new collection How It Ended is exactly the triumph that Metcalf shortly admits it to be.

Otherwise, Metcalf's assessment reeks of received opinion, not so much for what it says about McInerney, whose authorial catalogue certainly has its weaker numbers (I'm looking at you, Model Behavior), but for the lousy rubric it sets up in this above-quoted opening salvo. There is, in the first place, a fine broad territory of excellent literature between Gatsby, which surely is a masterpiece of American literature, and the collected works of John Marquand. I know this, because all of Fitzgerald's other finished novels inhabit that territory, as does most of McInerney's short and long fiction. "[T]he floating detritus of showbiz and the international rich—adepts in the competition that is a free agent society"--well, who does Metcalf think lives in the pages of This side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, or Tender Is the Night? (For that matter, who does he think Gatsby is all about?) True, Gatsby's society losers prefer gin to coke. This in particular animates Metcalf's quibbles with McInerney.

I dare you to read This Side of Paradise and tell me that it is a superior novel, poetically, morally, or psychologically, to Bright Lights, Big City.