Readers familiar with Jay McInerney's Bright Lights Big City may feel a sense of déjà vu when reading Model Behavior. Once again our hero is a small cog in the glamorous Manhattan media machine. Yet although the players may look the same, the rules of the game have changed--their ambitions and expectations are not the same as they were a decade or more ago. Connor McKnight is not brought low by drugs and other symbols of 1980s-style excess; instead, his relationship is destroyed by premillennial ennui and the numbing effects of his career as a celebrity journalist (celebrity being to the '90s what cocaine was to the '80s). The fact that all these shiny happy people really aren't happy at all is hardly news, but McInerney is both a chronicler and a satirist of this glitzy corner of the world, and his astute wit saves the novel from being as shallow as its subjects. This is not poisonous satire à la Martin Amis but a more affectionate (yet equally effective) mocking of modern pretensions, such as P.G. Wodehouse in Hugo Boss. McInerney's comic timing is best demonstrated in one of the longest scenes, a Thanksgiving dinner that ends in chaos when Connor's father exposes himself to the turkey-munching patrons of a tony Manhattan eatery. While the author's sixth book may not be very far removed from his first, that isn't necessarily a criticism. Like a botanist who studies only pondweed, McInerney has narrowed his focus to perfect it. Model Behavior, and the seven stories collected with it, demonstrate that no one else can render this peculiar little social set as accurately, or as artfully as McInerney. --Simon Leake

From Publishers Weekly
The protagonists of these witty stories tend to be outsiders, never quite at home in their seemingly glamorous milieus: a young New York movie reviewer who hopes to sell screenplays in Hollywood; a famous actor who visits his wife at a mental institution; an aspiring writer who becomes a crackhead and lives among Manhattan's transvestite hookers. Connor McKnight, the hero of the first-person novel from which the collection takes its title, is no exception to this rule. He abandons his study of Zen and Japanese literature to write for a celebrity magazine in Manhattan and live with a model. At the same time, his best friend, Jeremy Green, a brooding, self-consciously Jewish short-story writer, becomes an unwilling socialite and fears jeopardizing his artistic reputation. Always scrupulous in demonstrating the comparative in-ness of his out-crowd, McInerney impresses here with his trenchant humor and keen eye for detail, as he vengefully skewers the New York literary scene and other, equally unforgiving cliques. (In a typical exchange, Jeremy asks whether Christopher Lehmann-Haupt is Jewish, then complains, "What's-her-fucking-name hates everybody except Anne fucking Tyler and Amy fucking Tan. I don't stand a chance. Wrong initials, wrong sex.") Although the novel ends abruptly and the seven stories, which span McInerny's career, seem tacked on, there is no question but that the aging 1980s wunderkind follows the scene of his early glory (Bright Lights, Big City) with a more savage, jaundiced eye. Say what you will, McInerny has few peers in chronicling a certain segment of contemporary society that he loves and hates at the same time. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
McInerney's sixth novel and accompanying seven short stories are sheer delights. Common motifs include smart young men with lots to learn, especially in matters of the heart; fast and hard living, whether in obscurity or celebrity; and painful personal betrayals. After detouring to larger themes and time spans with The Last of the Savages (LJ 4/15/96), the author returns to New York, popular culture, and characters aptly described as "glib depressives on parade." The novel details a tumultuous year in the life of its narrator, Connor McKnight, a thirtysomething celebrity magazine writer. Philomena, his model girlfriend, leaves him to live with the actor he has been trying to interview; his best friend, Jeremy, dies?but not before revealing that he and Philomena indulged in a major flirtation; Connor is arrested for head-butting the actor; and his sister Brooke, a sad anorexic, is sliced with a boxcutter by a stalker-fan of Connor. Though seemingly calamitous, all is done with deft humor. Highly recommended.-?Sheila M. Riley, Smithsonian Inst. Libs., Washington, DCCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, A.O. Scott
McInerney, after four attempts to make good on the extravagant promise of Bright Lights, seems to have decided to play the first act over again, this time more compactly and with a bit more of what we in the 90's like to call "edge."

Entertainment Weekly, Benjamin Svetkey
True, the terrain is not altogether unfamiliar, but so what? Frankly it's a kick having McInerney back in town.

The Wall Street Journal, Kyle Pope
...flashes of wit grace the writing in this book.... It's an entertaining read that, ultimately, feels a bit empty.

From AudioFile
Richard Cox rises to the challenges of Jay McInerney's latest work of fiction. The brief novel is made up of text blocks ranging from a single sentence to a couple of pages, each with its own subhead and varying points of view. But what could have been disorienting for the listener somehow isn't, thanks to Cox's changes of intonation and voices that define the characters without overacting. The novel's antihero, celebrity-tracking magazine writer Connor McKnight, is a mix of New York cool and hopeless ennui. Cox is totally convincing in his portrayal of the latter trait, and, although his cool is occasionally a bit too "kewl," he would make an ideal reader for any McInerney novel. D.B. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
McInerney went for breadth in the ambitious The Last of the Savages (1996) with mixed results, and now, in a concise novel accompanied by seven short stories, he returns to his forte: tightly constructed and viciously funny satires of the high life of New York and Hollywood. The novel, Model Behavior, is a mosaic of short takes recording the muddled life of Connor McKnight, a writer with literary longings reduced to pounding out celebrity fluff for a fashion magazine. Tainted by the miasma of insincerity that permeates his glib world, Connor hasn't been paying attention to his relationship with his model girlfriend, Philomena, who seems to be landing an inordinate number of out-of-town assignments. As it slowly dawns on him that something is seriously awry, his behavior slips from vaguely objectionable to all-out alarming, a slide echoed by the crazed actions of his best friend, a golden-maned, immensely gifted, and habitually outraged writer who subjects strangers to high-volume tirades and can't stop harassing the people who adopted his dog. As McInerney puts his confused heroes through their paces, he slashes away at the absurdities of the publishing, fashion, and movie worlds with consummate skill. This brisk, thoroughly entertaining novel is followed by a set of impeccable short stories that extends McInerney's illumination of the ever confounding gap between image and reality. What makes McInerney so likable is the ingenuousness behind his cynicism. Even as he so wittily mocks the absurdity of the glamour industry, he is still enamored of the dreams it sells. Donna Seaman

Review
"McInerney in full command of his gifts...With their bold, clean characterizations, their emphatic
ironies and their disciplined adherence to sound storytelling principles [the stories] remind one of, well, Fitzgerald and also of Hemingway--of classic stories like 'Babylon Revisited' and 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.' They are models of the form"
--A. O. Scott on the 7 stories in The New York Times Book Review

"His portraiture is quick, vivid, and often very funny...He has an effortless knack for the cadences of dialogue...It would take a roomful of M. F. A.'s a thousand years to produce a thumbnail sketch as sarcastically sharp as [his] precis of his protagonist's family history"
--A. O. Scott reviewing the novel in The New York Times Book Review

"Smart, funny, sexy and well observed"
--Philip Watson, Esquire

"Clever, funny and moving...A Great Gatsby for the end of the century: quietly tragic, a comically rueful guide...with emotional and moral weight"
--Ken Tucker
The Baltimore Sun

"His sixth novel, Model Behavior, does for the Nineties what Bright Lights, Big City did for the Eighties. It is just as stylish, just as sharp, not quite as sad; if anything, funnier"        
--Tim De Lisle
The Independent on Sunday, London

"Splendidly adventurous [and] made all the more fascinating by the maturity of his outlook...McInerney is making far more serious comments about not simply New York values, but American ones in general"        
-- Frank Egerton, Financial Times

"Jay McInerney has developed into one of the sharpest social observers writing contemporary
fiction"        
--Seattle Times

"High comedy and low living...A frighteningly evocative idea of the temptations of indulging an
addictive, self-obsessed personality...McInerney demonstrates compassion as well as contempt for these spectacularly dysfunctional figures"        
--David Harspool
Times Literary Supplement, London

"Model Behavior is what you might call meta-McInerney...Swift and amusing, the tone
of it is just right...An astute social observer of the cruelties of modern New York, he is also capable of great tenderness"
--Gail Caldwell, Boston Globe

"His sixth novel and accompanying stories are sheer delights"
--Library Journal

"Lines that drip with wit and scenes that percolate with hilarity. McInerney is most powerful when he writes of things that both attract and repel him...His magic is that he is a writer who continues
to experiment"        
-Gina Vivinetto
St. Petersburg Times

FROM THE PUBLISHER

With five novels over the past 14 years, Jay McInerney has demonstrated time and again 'his talent for capturing the nuances and idiosyncrasies of our culture' (San Francisco Chronicle), and nowhere is this more apparent than in Model Behavior, in which he returns to the locale of Bright Lights, Big City, Story of My Life, and Brightness Falls: the restless isle of Manhattan, where neither wishes nor even dreams ever sleep. Connor McKnight — former acolyte of film, Zen and Japanese literature — is not unaware that these avocations are wildly remote from his present occupation (fledgling celebrity journalist). Moreover, his longtime girlfriend, the fashion model Philomena, suddenly seems curiously remote herself — and soon enough appears to have decamped, avec diaphragm, for the other coast. Then there's the sister with whom he shared a flamboyantly addled childhood, and who now matches her brilliance for theoretical abstraction with a compassion for world suffering so acute that her own well-being is imperiled. These and other anxieties, Connor finds, can scarcely be assuaged by his trio of flirting obsessions — a gorgeous stripper, a screenplay-in-progress in his drawer, the notion of a meaningful future — or by his principal ally and best friend, a monkishly neurotic, militantly vegetarian writer whose sanity balances precisely on the publication of his new story collection and on the fate of his Irish terrier.

So now, as Thanksgiving and Christmas bear down upon him, not to mention a female admirer who's stalking him by e-mail, Connor gropes his hapless, hilarious way toward not so much salvation asself-preservation, favoring the right things as he is relentlessly pursued by all the wrong, bad, ill-advised or plain unlucky. Model Behavior is McInerney at full tilt — while the seven stories included trace the arc of his career and, in their exploration of the varieties of delusion, fame and experience, display anew his rare ability to comprehend and re-create the manic flux of our society. |

FROM THE CRITICS

Gary Krist - Salon

Is Jay McInerney overrated or underappreciated? Tough question. Certainly you can make a convincing argument that his reputation is as inflated as a Wall Street bonus: After achieving instant luminary status with Bright Lights, Big City, a funny but slight first novel that happened to catch a tsunami-size Zeitgeist wave, he produced a bevy of hyped disappointments -- most recently The Last of the Savages, a stiff, schematic attempt at "literary seriousness" that stole shamelessly from the Dead-White-Male English curriculum (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Yates, etc.). On the other hand, McInerney also wrote what I consider the best and most undervalued novel of 1980s venality -- albeit a little tardily in 1992. Sure, Brightness Falls got some strong reviews, but it was too often considered a poor sibling of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, a book that can't match Brightness's elegiac richness and surprising depth of characterization.

Now, with Model Behavior, McInerney gives more ammunition to his naysayers. Packaged together with seven short stories, the title novel is a sporadically entertaining comedy that ends up trying for an emotional heft its thin plot line can't support. Returning to his well-dissected turf of downtown clubs and celebrity-haunted soirees, McInerney chronicles the decline and fall of Conner McKnight, a disgruntled journalist for a fashion magazine called "CiaoBella!" Despite having a $600 bank balance, Conner is the kind of guy who utters comments like: "Actually, I've never been a big Lafite fan." But don't let this tone of condescension fool you; Conner is actually suffering from a bad case of serotonin envy. Always an obscure player in a world whose Golden Rule is "Behave unto others as if they were about to become incredibly famous," he finds his already precarious social stock on the verge of a nose dive. Philomena, his supermodel girlfriend, is refusing to have sex with him, apparently as a preface to moving out. Meanwhile, his boss at CiaoBella! is threatening to fire him for uncool behavior in public. Hollywood stars have stopped returning his phone calls. If he's not careful, he might even have trouble getting a decent table at Union Square Cafe.

As usual, McInerney writes with great wit and verbal ingenuity. (My favorite line: "We moved to New York -- which is to monogamy what the channel changer is to linear narrative.") But the book exudes an aura of disingenuousness that dulls its satiric bite. McInerney is trying to parody a world whose glamour, all ironic poses notwithstanding, he obviously buys into. He's like one of those ingrates at fashionable gatherings who declaim ad nauseam against the boredom and inanity of such events -- but who never seem to turn down an invitation. And really, lampooning supermodels, Hollywood actors and media trend-slaves is a bit like shooting overfed angelfish in a barrel. It all seems a little too easy.

Still, McInerney might have pulled it off if he hadn't tried to get serious. Toward the end of the novel, Conner's crash-and-burn begins to take on a more earnest tone (somebody dear to him even dies a violent death, but given how obnoxious the character is, readers may greet this development with relief). Then, as in his first novel, McInerney tries to wrap things up on a note of bogus redemption, with our hero renouncing the triviality of his former existence in favor of a simpler, more honest mode of life. In Bright Lights, this redemption was symbolized by the main character's trading his groovy Ray-Bans for a bag of freshly baked bread. In Model Behavior, Conner forswears celebrity journalism and turns to what he considers a better, truer kind of writing -- i.e., he starts work on a movie script about his life.

A movie script? I guess it shows how far we've come that screenwriting -- which used to represent the ultimate sellout in novels like this -- has now become a kind of literary Peace Corps, the salvation of choice for escapees from a world even shallower than Hollywood.

Donna Seaman - Booklist

This brisk, thoroughly entertaining novel is followed by a set of impeccable short stories that extends McInerney's illumination of the ever confounding gap between image and reality. What makes McInerney so likable is the ingenuousness behind his cynicism. Even as he so wittily mocks the absurdity of the glamour industry, he is still enamored of the dreams it sells.

Jared Stern - New York Post

Like Bright Lights, Model Behavior is a quintessentially New York story. And like the city itself, McInerney's latest is bound to chafe in places. But no one who truly loves Manhattan in all its soiled beauty and shopworn glamour can fail to derive pleasure from this book.

Entertainment Weekly

. . .[A] sharp little novel (along with seven short stories). . . .Fame is the drug everyone in these pages is hooked on. . . .more than any of hsi fellow Brat Packers. ..McInerney is the real thing, a writer of undeniable flair and charm. . . .Frankly, it's a kick having McInerney back in town.

Walter Kirn - New York Magazine