At home with stories

On a cloudy day in New York's meatpacking district, images of the old world — men in aprons, lonely figures with upturned collars walking down by the Hudson River — blur into those of the new: freakishly tall blondes who get their spike heels stuck in the cobblestones.

This is Jay McInerney territory. His latest book, How it Ended: New and Collected Stories, covers several decades in his chosen neighbourhood, his adopted hometown within a town.

McInerney always has believed in living among the people he writes about. The research has been intensive and, at times, exhausting.

McInerney is on his fourth marriage — he has two children with his third wife, Helen Bransford — and he is not ashamed. “I believed in each one of these marriages,'' he says.

“The conventional view is that I've had three failed marriages. But I believe I've had three successful marriages.'' (“Expensive,'' he says, sighing.)

Enriched by matrimony

Much like his stories, which often contain the seeds of his novels, each marriage has provided material. Since 2006, he has been married to Anne Randolph Hearst (granddaughter of William Randolph, sister of Patty). They are about to go to the Turks and Caicos Islands with friends.

“I was burnt out on New York in the 1980s, sick of it in the 1990s,'' McInerney says. But the city earned his respect after the attacks of September 11, 2001. “I feel sorry for people who missed it. You really felt part of a community.''

McInerney is hoping the economic downturn will cleanse New York of investment banker culture, making room for a return of artists.

McInerney moved to New York when he was 22, after his mother died. “In the 1980s,'' he recalls, “nobody was writing about New York, this rich and fertile terrain with its intersecting social classes. People were still perpetuating the myth of an America with no social classes.''

McInerney is a funny mix of trendy and earnest. He outright laughs at a question about the writer's obligation to his readers, to tell them something about how to live.

“People pick up books for two reasons: entertainment and edification. ... At most, you hope to illuminate what it is to be human. ... I've been trying to have fun with the language and tell a story in a voice that was uniquely mine.''

McInerney's first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, did precisely that when it was published in 1984. The saga of a fact checker at a magazine who spends his nights on club binges, the book was written in second person and seemed to signal a new sensibility in which the road of excess led to a desiccated numbness.

In the ensuing 25 years, McInerney's career has been a back-and-forth of ambition and retrenchment.

His 1985 novel, Ransom, featured a group of young expatriates lost in a corrupt underworld in Japan. Story of My Life in 1988 revolved around a girl named Alison Poole who is a precursor to the spoilt rich children on Gossip Girl. (McInerney, it turns out, played himself in the show's first episode.)

Throughout the 1990s he tried to write “big novels'' but he remains known for his first book. So long is the shadow of Bright Lights, Big City that few people noticed when, in 2006, McInerney wrote The Good Life, a novel about human goodness.

“I suppose I sympathise with my characters too much,'' McInerney admits. “I don't find it useful simply to ridicule the people around me.

I'm not a cold blooded satirist. In some ways Alison Poole was terribly shallow and silly but few of us are truly evil.'' Many of the stories in How it Ended are about failed relationships, failures in communication. “Bliss is hard to portray,'' he says.

New novel in the works

McInerney's characters reappear throughout his stories and novels. He has had the same editor, Gary Fisketjon, for all his books. Fisketjon, McInerney says proudly, is “the last of the great literary purists, disdainful of the marketplace. We argue about commas but he never tells me what to do.''

For the past several months, McInerney has been at work on a novel about “a middle-aged guy who had it all and lost it all. Crashed and burnt in the beginning of the present decade.

He becomes a blue-collar worker. I started it in July and have no idea how it will end. It's kind of scary. My dirty little secret is that I think plot is a necessary evil on which to hang dialogue. I associate plot with trashy fiction.''

The phone rings. It is one of McInerney's friends calling to ask if he should bring his fishing gear to the Turks and Caicos.

There is another call about a remake of the film Bright Lights, Big City. At 54, McInerney isn't behaving like a guy on the downside of the curve.

“I feel terrible for people,'' he says, “but I'm kind of excited about the recession. It might make us better people. I guess I'm an optimist. Why else would I get married four times?''