Model mission

Jay McInerney may not have perfected the art of literary celebrity - think men behaving badly Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Mailer - …

Jay McInerney may not have perfected the art of literary celebrity - think men behaving badly Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Mailer - but once this 1980s wunderkind leaped to international attention with his first fiction, Bright Lights Big City, he was It.

"Yeah, it was sort of a curse: I really wasn't thinking of myself as writing a Zeitgeist book. Suddenly I was supposed to be a spokesman for a generation, a tough mantle to assume. I was only trying to find my own line of dissent, I was cobbling together my own notion of how to add something to the literary canon in some modest way."

So he rose above the parapet as an icon of the culture he had outed, and took punishment ever after. I called it "minor". He doesn't think it was all that minor.

"Bright Lights was reviewed as a serious novel until it became hugely popular and started to sell 250,00 copies a week, and then a backlash set in and suddenly the object itself was almost transformed in the eyes of the would-be guardians of the culture. The feeling was if this many people liked it, then it probably wasn't serious. The book became a kind of cultural phenomenon, a symbol rather than a system of symbols, for some people a guide to what became known as the 1980s."

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Which was, in a way, his point. Walter Benjamin 50 years earlier worried about the impact of mass culture on those "exacting silences" which punctuate the best relationships between reader and writer. Can literature investigate mass culture without being contaminated by it? If it refuses to, or fails, in what form can it survive? McInerney's smash-and-grab literary devices suggested writers should take the reader and run.

Must mass culture bring everything down? McInerney rocks in his chair.

"If a large enough animal comes into a room, it's going to crowd out a lot of us who are already here. It might be an interesting animal, but it's going to rush some people, and others will flee, and that's one way of looking at it, whether the specific manifestation is Planet Hollywood, or Armageddon the movie."

One step back, McInerney talks about his own core mission in Model Behaviour, his sixth novel, to write about "the dialogue between Shakespeare and Quentin Tarentino, between Fitzgerald and Portishead". Catching the tension between mass culture and the pure "traditions" of literary art, his language is risky, fast, a kind of Hunter S. Thompson meets Richardson, Sterne and Smollet with a peppering of Canon Sheehan, but much, much crisper. Its own ambivalence is his greatest challenge - how to survive as a literary writer within a mass culture, using its linguistic models, without getting crushed to death.

"It's basically a story about illusion and reality, about the worship of false idols . . . the claustrophobic madness of the city," says tortured high-art character Jeremy Green about Model Behaviour, the same-name story he's trying to get published. He's naive, as his surname suggests, but there's more besides: Jeremy is also the moniker of one J. Bentham, radical philosopher and utilitarian, who wrote volumes his friends later published, defining the ethics of human behaviour by what he called the greatest-pleasure principle.

"Every man pursues his own pleasure," Bentham pronounced. Model Behaviour is a textbook exploration of what conflicts follow that belief. In the society of Model Behaviour, what passes for ethical resolution brings death, marriage or your first Hollywood script commission. Jeremy's story is eventually poached by his celebrity interviewer friend, Connor McKnight, occasional narrator and minor functionary in the gossip culture networks, who spends most of the book pointlessly courting lost girlfriend, the supermodel Philomena.

This is his big issue. "One of the things that's frightening about American culture is that gossip has replaced hard news, the international debate is reduced to this horrible level of the personal. The distinction between the advertising pages of the magazines where models appear blatantly selling clothes and the so-called editorial pages blatantly promoting the latest product from Hollywood - the lines are becoming blurred. The Clinton follies are partly a extension of this notion of politics as entertainment because more and more we focus our primary attention, our paradigm, is entertainment and gossip, we spend so much time wondering about the sex lives of Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow it's easy for the Clinton scandal to take up an inordinate amount of our time. Most people don't care, but now the thing has been set in motion, it can't be stopped."

McInerney lives inside the loop he looks at, holed up in Manhattan with his favourite dog and his family, taking trips to his farm in Nashville. His middle-class parents were of Irish ancestry.

"Yeah, we weren't reared to be tribal but neither did we become Episcopalian. I was the last generation to grow up where you were aware if you were Catholic." He works on screenplays in between novels as a way of checking out "the day-to-day politics of the real world, and it's lucrative too". Does he make enough money from the novels to live well?

"What's enough?" his eyebrows arch. "It's never enough."

Profiles now routinely explain his Don Juan love life and pluralist sampling of designer drugs to the teaser that his Mama singled him out for special, perhaps selfish, attention. It could be true, probably is: he's cute, he's questing, he's good with women. But McInerney's take on media is so sharp, so wickedly inside, you really have to suspect a spin in every synecdoche.

Whatever his views on mass culture and celebrity, he has in a sense colluded with his own celebrity by letting those media explore some of his most private experiences and relationships, events sometimes more silly than tragic, but always very today. This extraordinary process of cannibalisation includes damning magazine allegations by his second wife, Merry, following her suicide attempt the year after their marriage broke down, a Vogue article by his third and present wife, Helen, of how their now three-and-a-half-year-old twins were conceived (his sperm, her country-and-western-singerfriend's eggs, and a neighbourhood waitress's womb), followed by a book from the same Helen illustrating and documenting her decision to have plastic surgery after McInerney had interviewed Julia Roberts for Harper's Bazaar and fancied her like mad.

Bill Buford, editor of the New Yorker, edged him into writing both this book and, perhaps more pertinently in the longer term, a memoir of his mother, to be published by Buford on August 26th.

"Someone told me, Freud may have said it, that it takes three generations for a family to work out a crime. I like that idea. It's something I've been thinking about."

His mother died when he was 23. His flight from that grief featured in Bright Lights. "The memoir is an attempt to recover some kind of happiness I've locked up. I was so pained when she died I tried not to think about it, so the piece tries to resurrect her on the page. But there's a narrative element too, it's a story she told me about herself I wasn't supposed to tell anyone until it came out in court because someone was trying to escape a jail sentence . . . It's a love story, my mother's illicit love story. Except it didn't happen with my father."

Model Behaviour by Jay McInerney is published by Bloomsbury, £14.99 in UK. It is reviewed in Fiction of the Week, Weekend 9.

`Suddenly I was supposed to be a spokesman for a generation, a tough mantle to assume. I was only trying to find my own line of dissent'