Bright lights, bad reviews, page 2

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These days, McInerney spends half his year in Nashville, where he lives with his third wife, the Nashville jewelry designer and socialite Helen Bransford, and their young twins. That fact, and the publication of his most critically-acclaimed novel to date, "Brightness Falls," in 1992, have in recent years brought on a revisionist wave of Is Jay McInerney Growing Up? stories. (Vanity Fair titled theirs "A New Jay Dawning.") Now McInerney is back with a new novel, "The Last of the Savages," which charts the arc of a life-long friendship between two men -- Will Savage is a self-destructive upper-class Southerner who goes on to produce black R & B singers; Patrick Keane is from a mill town in New England and aspires to Yale, law school and respectability.

Thus far, the novel has had critics keening once again for blood, essentially labeling the book Fitzgerald lite. But in a recent interview at his publisher's offices in New York, McInerney shrugged, sipped a Frappucino, and seemed willing to let history be his judge.

Kingsley Amis once said that a bad review ruins his breakfast but not his lunch. How much do they affect you?

Well, they do ruin my breakfast probably. When I get a bad review from someone like Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, I think: Well, she's hated every single one of my books. If The New York Times is as powerful as it's supposed to be, I wouldn't have a career. She started out trashing "Bright Lights, Big City," at a time when the attitude was that you either ignored first novels or praised them. I can't say that it makes me happy, but it's sort of predictable by now. As my editor Gary Fisketjon said to me: What you should really be worried about is if she liked this book -- unless you've suddenly decided that all your other work is no good. I just seem to have a pretty adversarial position with particularly the New York critics. The perceived success of my first novel continues to work against me with these critics, who would like to be the gatekeepers between readers and writers. "Bright Lights, Big City," for example, wasn't a book that was wildly successful because a lot of critics praised it. It was a grassroots phenomenon. This seems to be particularly true in New York, my hometown. I tend to get a lot more grief here than anywhere else.

Somebody once wrote that the further you get from New York -- and particularly in Europe -- the more esteem you're held in.

It's a funny thing. Out-of-town readers have a completely different response than New Yorkers. Another problem is that I know half these critics. They should recuse themselves out of basic conflicts of interest. I did an essay about various critics, including Kakutani, in Esquire a few years ago which talked about how abysmal the state of book reviewing was. It strikes me that she might maybe start passing my books along to another reviewer. And there are these other reviewers who I have slightly negative personal relationships with who don't seem obliged to point that out when they are reviewing. But I'm more interested in the overall perception of the book. I must say that I thought this highly personal, intemperate kind of criticism might have died down by now, but it doesn't seem to have yet. I'd feel worse if my foreign publishers hadn't been so enthusiastic, and Hollywood hadn't been so enthusiastic and my early readers -- the people I count on to tell me how I'm doing -- hadn't been so enthusiastic. It would be really nice to get universally good reviews, but that doesn't seem too likely for me.

In the '80s, critics seemed to be almost resentful of how good a time you seemed to be having. If you had it all to do over again, would you do anything differently?

Well, I'd do a lot of things differently. I think it probably didn't occur to me at the time, the accumulated weight of my appearances in the media. I was just wildly overexposed. But it was hard to imagine back then that, for someone who wrote books, publicity wasn't a real windfall. At first, I couldn't get any publicity. The publicist at Random House sat me down one day and said, "Look, there's a chance you can be Cosmo's Bachelor of the Month." It was the only thing she could think of to do for me. And I said: "I'm sorry -- but I just got married." She said: "Oh, scratch that." And that was it. "We'll wait for the reviews. Who knows, maybe something will happen." So at the time it seemed great that anybody was paying attention. But in retrospect it was too much. So yeah, I wish I stayed out of the spotlight a little more. There are some things I wish I hadn't said. There are a lot of little things I'd do differently. But I don't think I'd write different books. I don't think that I'd wish for a conventional career, for as much grief as this one has sometimes given me. I'd rather have this strange career, and I'd rather have a lot of readers. I'd rather have them talking than not talking.

Your literary hero -- F. Scott Fitzgerald -- wasn't exactly aloof from society and the high life.

He wasn't for the early part of his career. Eventually, he sort of retreated. Or the spotlight retreated from him, really. It was very strange the way his career was so much a function of the decade. His twenties were the '20s. By the time the stock market crashed, Zelda was losing her mind and he was disappearing inside the bottle basically. It's a terrible story. He's someone I've always really admired, but he makes a terrible role model. Particularly at my age, to hit 40, you wonder how much you want to emulate someone who died at 44. He pretty much finished his good work well before then. On the other hand, I find such condescension toward Fitzgerald -- if you've read any of the biographies. After reading about what a terrible drinker he was, and a terrible person, you want to say: Then who wrote "Gatsby"? He became a symbol of the time, then he was crucified when people became disenchanted with their own excesses.

Some critics have suggested that the two main characters in your new book -- one of whom, Will Savage, is a larger-than-life record producer, the other, Patrick Keane, is a fairly traditional sort, and a lawyer -- are a bit like Gatsby and Nick Carroway.

Well, I don't see that as much as some people do. It is a first person narrative about a somewhat larger-than-life figure, but I think the resemblances don't go too much farther than that. I think Will Savage is a far less sketchy figure than Gatsby. You know, I was thinking about it recently, in a way the novel more resembles "Brideshead Revisited" than "The Great Gatsby." Also, it's the story of a genuine friendship, which Gatsby really isn't. Nick and Gatsby are acquaintances at best. As I announce in the first line of the book really, it's a story about friendship: "Friendship is God's way of apologizing for your family." And it's a book about family, too. But I'm a great admirer of "Gatsby" -- there's certainly some line of influence.

Why set this book in the '60s?

I've always thought that one of the most interesting questions in my time is: Who won that war in the '60s? I mean, there was allegedly a great social revolution undertaken, a cultural war. I was too young to participate in it, but I always was fascinated. It was kind of like the girl that you never got to sleep with being the one that was really interesting. I never got to go to Woodstock or buy a Volkswagen van and grow my hair real long. I just missed it all. But I watched it on television and heard it on the transistor radio. When, for example, you hear Janis Joplin being used to sell Mercedes Benzes, it's mind-boggling. Rock and roll was supposed to be a kind of upwelling of the id, it was supposed to be a socially liberating, politically dangerous ideology. And now it's big business. And I was intrigued by the notion of someone like Will Savage, who fights in the vanguard of that movement and yet comes down to the present. Some people didn't -- Jim Morrisson, Jimi Hendrix and those guys. That's what you expect of a rock and roller -- die young, stay pretty, self-destruct, go up in a big Dionysian flame. So all this partly grew out of my '60s envy.

The book seems very concerned with class, too. Will came from the Southern upper class, and he rebels against it. Patrick's lower-middle class, and he feels he can't rebel. He wants to climb.

We're not supposed to have a class system in America, but anybody who's ever been to prep school or an Ivy League college knows that there is one. I didn't go to prep school; my wife did. And Patrick is keenly sensitive to it -- he's kind of a snob, he wants to be part of it. He knows that, unlike in England, over here you can climb a whole class in the course of your life. And then your kids can pick up another one. He goes from the lower middle class to the upper middle class during the course of the book. It might not be much of a goal -- I'm not advocating his climb. I think, in that way, I identify more with Will. But if everybody had embraced the Age of Aquarius and marched off to a different drummer, I don't know who would be filing the taxes or building the houses. The whole idea of a social order is based on the idea that you need 10,000 Patricks for every Will.

Did you share, growing up, any of Patrick's aspirations?

I had a much more privileged background. My father was a corporate vice president, and I lived almost half of my childhood in Europe, so I can't say that I share his background. I'm not as class conscious as he is, maybe because I didn't have to be. I think that it was easier for me to imagine Patrick than to go all the way inside Will's mind. One of the reasons there weren't very many great '60s novels, I think, is because a character like Will represents the antithesis of the idea of analysis, of emotion recollected in tranquility. He's kind of a whirling dervish. I wouldn't say I really identify with Patrick, but he's easier for me to comprehend.

You ended up studying with Raymond Carver at Syracuse. How much did his kind of minimalism influence you?

Well, I was influenced early on by Carver. By the time I got to study with him I had kind of gotten over my imitation-of-Carver period. His first book, "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?", came out in 1976 and it was a revelation to me. It was what it must have been like reading Hemingway back in the '20s. At that time, realism seemed almost dead. Barth, Coover, and John Hawkes were writing novels about novels and about writers, a very reflexive and baroque metafiction. And so Carver and Ann Beattie came along and it was like the reinvention of realism. Which I guess I've always been more interested in. I don't think that the realistic narrative tradition is dead yet, and that was one of the things that was amazing about Carver. And his language was just extraordinary. You can't really imitate it -- I mean, everybody does. I'd love to edit an anthology sometime of Raymond Carver imitations. Half of the people in graduate school were writing them. I went through that phase -- I actually imitated a lot of people -- but you get over it over the course of the years. That's how you learn.

I like the E.L. Doctorow quote you've used to explain why you don't do a lot of advance plotting before you start to write -- the idea that writing a novel is like taking a cross-country car trip at night. You can never see further than your headlights, but you arrive nonetheless.

This one I had to try harder. This one has much more of a plot than any of my other books. It has this timeline. Which is why, I think, in Hollywood there was much more interest in this book than anything else I've written. It leaked out there. Story has never been my strong suit. "Bright Lights, Big City" and "The Story of My Life" were riffs more than anything else. It's hard to film a riff. Not that Hollywood is what I think about when I write. The story is about the only thing that survives the translation to film. Certainly voice doesn't.

You're about to become a wine columnist, aren't you?

Condé Nast is just starting up House & Garden again, and the editor, Dominique Browning, who used to be at Newsweek, knew that I was kind of a wine buff. She offered me the job and I thought, why not?

I imagine it can be hard to write about wine without sounding like a terrible snob.

That's the challenge I've set myself. I'm just going to do it for a year and see if it works. I'm trying to write a kind of gonzo wine column. I call it "An Idiot in the Cellar." I want to write from the point of view of someone who knows something but not everything. And who's willing to admit he has no idea what the hell malolactic fermentation is. They could have got a regular wine critic, an expert. But what I want to try to do is write about wine in a funny way. And write from the point of view in between the experts and the average person looking at a wine list and saying "Oh shit, what do I do now?" It's one of life's little pleasures. And now that I'm happily married, I need some non-illicit pleasures.

Do those illicit pleasures still attract you at all? Clubs?

Yeah. I mean, a little bit. Not like they used to. A lot of that is about the whole mating ritual -- chasing sex. I don't find it fascinating to go to every new nightclub, or go out every night. But you know, on the other hand, I've been to Pravda. I still like to go out sometimes. But not obsessively. I'm still interested in seeing what's going on. I'm still interested in having fun, but it's no longer a real driving force. I never went out quite as much as I was supposed to anyway. Before I wrote "Bright Lights, Big City" I couldn't really get in anywhere. And I didn't have any money. And afterwards, every time that I did go out, it seemed to become some kind of gossip column item. It seemed that I was out rather more than I was. But then again, I probably did more than most people. I did more than my readers, but maybe they expected it of me.

Do you still get shanghaied, after readings, by people who come up wanting to go partying with the legendary Jay McInerney?

Not as much, but yeah, a lot of people still associate me with the idea of clublife. And I think some of the people who go to nightclubs now got their first glimpse through reading my work. So yeah, I see a certain amount of, "Hey, wow, let's party with Jay. That will be cool." In New York, people are pretty jaded. In New York, I see people, when they think I'm not looking, nudging their companion, indicating me. But people don't come up to you much in New York. When I go on reading tours or something, there's always some guy who comes up after the reading and says, "Hey man, I can take care of you." It's nice. But on the other hand, I'm 40 years old. I don't necessarily want to be the symbol of hard, fast living. It's part of what I'm still up against -- the very powerful stereotype that's developed around me as a result of that first book. I think it's confusing for some people to think of me writing about something else. But that's what I have to do. I have to grow and change and develop. And I have to convince my readers to come along with me.