Fast Lane revisited

While it may be true that some writers have made careers out of writing the same book over and over again, it is odd that Jay McInerney's sixth novel, Model Behaviour (Bloomsbury, £14.99 in UK), should mark so obvious a return to - no, make that rerun of - his first published, though not first written, book, Bright Lights, Big City (1984). As a chronicler of fast living in New York's fast lane, McInerney seemed born to the job.

Timing is all in fiction of the moment, and his slick, all-encompassing grasp of a frenetic society combined well with a flair for snappy one-liners. There is a catch, though: thin topical jokes don't wear too well the second time round.

Bright Lights, Big City is one of those once-off books, a narrative which seems to sum up an era. No mean feat, considering its narrator is a hopeless young man whose liking for dope and booze alienates his model-girl wife, as well as helping to lose him his job as a fact checker in a magazine which sounds a lot like the New Yorker. The entire narrative is told in the second person, and the tone of exasperated horror in the "Reader, I kid you not" mode is cleverly sustained. His next book, Ransom, a dull, earnest work which was written first but published later, within a year of Bright Lights, Big City, was not as dazzling, but that was not entirely a bad thing, as it seemed to indicate there was also a serious, indeed angst-ridden, dimension to his fiction. It also showed that McInerney the writer could function outside Manhattan.

By book number three he was back home with Story of My Life (1988), narrated by Alison, an aspiring young actress with a jaundiced view of existence, a repertoire of one-liners and a growing dependence on cocaine. "Families," she exclaims, "Jesus. At least with lovers you can break up. These old novels and plays that always start out with orphans, in the end they find their parents - I want to say, don't look for them, you're better off without. Believe me. Get a dog instead. That's one of my big ambitions in life - to be an orphan. With a trust fund, of course."

So far, so kind of good. McInerney's position as a clever, knowing writer with a good ear was firmly consolidated by Alison's fast and funny monologue. But even fans would not have suspected that he was capable of producing a work as large, as profound and as unexpectedly moving as Brightness Falls. Published in 1992, it is a swan song for the 1980s. In it, the lives of several pampered yuppies begin to unravel. The element which in this book elevated McInerney's narrative beyond his previous work was the extent to which he engaged the sympathy of his readers for barely likable characters. Brightness Falls won him new admirers and a new respect.

All of which had an impact on McInerney, whose next book, The Last of the Savages (1996), was content to linger on the same themes of regret and longing, albeit set in the South. Rather than being a step forward for him, it seemed to leave him somewhere in no man's land, hankering after romance but clearly far from the Manhattan world he knows so well.

Model Behaviour is set in the heart of McInerney's spiritual home. In fact, the book could be called Bright Lights, Big City Mark Two. The problem is, it is not as sure-footed as Mark One, the delivery is haphazard, even distracted, and the impact less deft and far less funny.

As before, the narrator is a hopeless young man, living with a model, whom he loses, as did the protagonist of his first book. This time, however, he is not married to her. Working as a journalist specialising in celebrity interviews with the dim and famous, he appears not to live but barely exist in a world of restaurants and gossip. It all seems very deja vu.

Casually moving between first-, second- and third-person narratives, this book of short, scene-like chapters creates an impression of having been written on the move - not exactly at various stages throughout a trip around the world, but in snatches, perhaps spoken into a dictaphone here, a dictaphone there. There are comic flashes, such as when a beautiful young hooker who dances naked, challenges the narrator by asking him, "What do you know?" His reply is interesting, even thoughtful: "I know the ending of The Charterhouse of Parma, but I wouldn't want to spoil it for you."

Connor McKnight, our educated if stupid two-dimensional narrator, is not entirely dislikable, since he barely exists. In keeping with McInerney's fascination with wacky relatives, Connor has a crazy sister who fears for the future of mankind, a father who never grew up, a kindly drunk for a mother, and a best friend who may, but most probably is not, a great American writer. And there is the increasingly elusive girlfriend, a wannabe model and actress, bearing the unlikely name of Philomena.

If there are unconscious echoes of The Great Gatsby in Brightness Falls - and awkward, more deliberate overtones of Fitzgerald in The Last of the Savages - Salinger is the literary influence presiding most uncomfortably over Model Behaviour. Brook is Connor's wayward sister. Although they are adults, they both act like spoilt children, as do most of the characters. Of Brook, the narrator offers observations such as "My sister, my beautiful tomboy sibling with an IQ like the surface temperature of the planet Venus". Even at his most journalistic, McInerney is capable of better prose than that. Never has his dialogue been so strained. Consider this exchange between Dad and the anorexic Brook: "Good God, Brooke . . . you look like you've been at Auschwitz", to which Brooke retorts: "I do wish people would stop frivolously invoking one of the major horrors of the century for the purposes of cheap physical analogies."

The comic set-piece which features an exasperated Dad exposing himself at a clan Thanksgiving supper in a restaurant, is unlikely to attain classic status, either. Throughout the narrative, Connor is tracking his absent girlfriend, fantasising about her - although she no longer has any interest in him - as he simultaneously tracking a celebrity for an interview he was commissioned to do. None of this adds up to much. It is not particularly funny, nor is it clever. The connection between the fleeing girlfriend and the evasive celebrity is so obvious as to be neon-signposted.

McInerney has summoned up many of the gags he has used so adroitly in the past and assembled them along with some topical observations in a careless, almost self-parodying book. Even at his slackest, McInerney remains a slick, witty writer. Shame he wasn't quite smart enough to avoid writing Model Behaviour.

Jay McInerney: old gags