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Scrambled collection of 26 short stories reveals writer's evolution
By Janet Maslin
New York Times
Published on Sunday, Apr 26, 2009
Jay McInerney's writing career has lasted nearly three decades, and what has he got to show for it? Seven novels, but the world at large can name only his first (Bright Lights, Big City).
Two essay collections devoted to wine. Prizes (from the James Beard Foundation and the Deauville Film Festival), but not the ones to which literary lights usually aspire.
A party-guy reputation borne out by the elements (drugs, infidelity, name-dropping and social climbing) that loom large in his fiction. And an etiquette that dictates that when a woman is about to snort cocaine, a gentleman helps by holding back her hair.
Now comes the game-changer: How It Ended, a collection of 26 short stories spanning 26 years. From afar, this concept does not seem promising. The stories' consistent length (an average of 12 pages) suggests an author who can hack them out as magazine filler.
The contention that seven of them belong in this collection because they were published in hardcover but not in paperback sounds feeble. And McInerney's introductory comment that the short story is like a one-night stand also has the ring of an excuse.
Yet the dodgiest aspect of How It Ended turns out to be this book's most interesting device. As a means of disguising the stories' repetitions and similarities, the book presents them in scrambled, unpredictable order. Not until you finish a story will you find out when it was written. Hence, a guessing game: The signposts of McInerney's writerly evolution are fascinating to pinpoint. Collectively, they validate the artistic growth this book seeks to display.
McInerney was a callow, facile and extremely entertaining writer from the very first. He had a command of technical virtues and an eagerness to show them off. He also had such a tiresome infatuation with 1980s-style decadence that it lingers even now. But his stories have grown more elegant, subtle, shapely and reflective over time, to the point where some of the recent works are perfect specimens. He has quietly achieved the literary stature to which he once so noisily laid claim.
This collection opens with a sure thing: the vignette that became the basis for Bright Lights, Big City. Out come the Bolivian Marching Powder and the grating second-person narrative voice in ''It's Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?''
With its scenes of night life followed by convenient early-morning redemption, this story glitters with the funny, glib locutions (''all messed up and no place to go'') that put the author on the map. ''You are a republic of voices tonight,'' its narrator tells himself. ''Unfortunately, that republic is Italy.''
That was the McInerney of 1982. By 1999, in Third Party, he had honed his gifts for satirical detachment without giving up his favorite milieu. ''Difficult to describe precisely, the taste of that eighth or ninth cigarette of the day, a mix of ozone, blond tobacco and early-evening angst on the tongue,'' that story begins. ''But he recognized it every time. It was the taste of lost love.''
Here the self-pity has grown deliberate and sly, as a lovelorn American named Alex savors Paris self-importantly. Though the heart of the story describes how two exotic strangers cloud Alex's vision, McInerney's acuity has gotten sharper. In a half-empty club, ''the only person they recognized was Bernard-Henri Levy,'' he writes. ''Either they were too early or a couple years too late.''
How It Ended is careful to separate this story of a seductive three-way flirtation from Invisible Fences, a clumsy, condescending version. Written in 2007, it's one of the few recent stories that are subpar. Beware McInerney's occasional but infrequent ordinary-guy characters; if he has any idea what ordinary guys are like, it hasn't yet surfaced in his work. This story's ''pretty normal'' main character works at a mall, has a son named Bucky and enjoys pimping out his wife to strangers.
McInerney uses sexual betrayal so deftly as a plot device that it would be a shame if the collection's most glaring example overshadows others. That example is Penelope on the Pond, in which McInerney revisits Alison Poole, the hilariously debauched female narrator of his novel Story of My Life. The real person on whom Alison was based rose to unwanted prominence in the last presidential campaign. She, like Alison, was the so-called media consultant for a very good-looking, rich, folksy Southern candidate with nice hair.
''Like, check out his stump speech, where he basically makes it sound like he didn't have shoes till he got to Duke on scholarship,'' Alison says. The story goes on to denigrate the candidate's marriage, call another contender a skirt-chaser and let Alison bitterly claim that her lover ''traded his soulmate for something he loved more.''
The single best illustration of McInerney's finesse comes with Summary Judgment, the witty and impeccably structured tale of a social-climbing scheme that goes awry as an ersatz contessa with a checkered past tries to marry a rich rube. ''She only thanked God they hadn't found out about Riyadh,'' the story says about the woman's suspicious stepchildren. McInerney knows it's best that we don't find out either.
Summary Judgment has no great depth or resonance. What it has is a highly polished, urbane wit and a wisdom apparently based on longtime observation. Henry James' dictum, ''Try to be one of those people on whom nothing is lost,'' is invoked by McInerney sardonically in Everything Is Lost. But this author has truly taken that credo to heart. And in his best work he becomes ''one of those people.''
Jay McInerney's writing career has lasted nearly three decades, and what has he got to show for it? Seven novels, but the world at large can name only his first (Bright Lights, Big City).
Get the full article here.
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