My S.F. Chronicle review from 1998:

It's hard to escape the feeling, reading the latest from the author of ``Bright Lights, Big City,'' that Jay McInerney really wanted to write a novel about a good-looking, model-dating Manhattan-based writer, still fighting the hangover of early success, who falls into a crisis over whether fiction-writing is meaningless.
McInerney actually does weigh in with ``Model Behavior,'' a 174-page novelette about a model- dating trash-magazine writer whose life is falling apart, much like the hero in McInerney's best-selling debut novel oh so many years ago. But, seemingly in acknowledgment that a tale so heavy with echoes of earlier work might not satisfy his public, McInerney packages it with seven previously published short stories.

It's a dangerous strategy that opens McInerney up to all sorts of ridicule, like the cheating husband who tells his wife that really, truly there's nothing going on with his sky-diving instructor -- and even if there was, it doesn't mean a thing. If this is a novel we're reading, shouldn't it be enough? If it's not, why call it one? The stories serve mostly to cast a depressing light on the so-called novel.

But just when you're getting ready to unleash a broadside on McInerney for an often- charming, seldom-memorable novel that almost goes out of its way to fall short of reasonable expectations, the stories come along. They remind you of just how sharp McInerney's eye is, how deftly he can change speeds on you for comic effect. The McInerney character in a story called ``Smoke,'' about a couple trying to toss cigarettes out of their lives, looks at his model-pretty wife: ``She was wearing her earnest, small-girl-wanting-to- know-why-the-sky-is-blue expression. He normally found this look devastating.''

And McInerney's gift for clear observation often gives him a certain psychological acuity, as when a movie star visiting his suicidal all-but- ex-wife at a scenic, expensive funny farm observes: ``Her eyes fastened onto his, tugging at him, asking for answers to all of her questions.''

But the most telling of the stories here may be ``How It Ended,'' whose clever title offers the story's only explicit mention of endings, as opposed to beginnings. Disguised as a tale of two young, cash-heavy couples on holiday in the tropics, this is really an 11-page clenched fist, shaking at The Muse and demanding: ``Why him? Why not me?!?''

McInerney saddles the self-satisfied narrator of this story with the name ``Donald,'' making it snidely clear how he feels about him. Donald and his wife, Cameron, meet a couple called the Van Heusens. The two couples get to drinking one evening as the sun ``was melting into the ocean, dyeing the water red and pink and gold. We all sat, hushed, watching the spectacle.''

Donald engages in his favorite game, asking other married couples how they met. Donald loves this game, we learn, because usually in the end he can tell the story of how he and Cameron met, a story he thinks kicks butt on any stories that might come along, the same way Mailer once imagined he kicked butt in the boxing great ring of contemporary letters.

But there's always someone out there with a better story, and this Van Heusen character has one: Long and involved, it starts with drug-dealing, an element that recurs in McInerney the way bears and wrestling do in John Irving. Then the tale, fortified by still more drinks, graduates to drug-running, time in a Cuban jail and the courtroom magicianship of a legendary attorney whose daughter ends up as Mrs. Van Heusen.

Poor Donald is quite out of sorts by the time Van Heusen's story is done. He hates Van Heusen, though he seems unclear on why. He hates Cameron for her sloppy-drunk clapping at its conclusion.

Unmanned in the storytelling department, Donald ultimately seems to hate himself: ``I turned back to my wife, grinning beside me in the cold sand. `You tell them,' I said.''

The story, first published in Playboy, suggests that McInerney seems to understand his central problem as a writer just as acutely as anyone: He has milked cocaine-flecked Manhattan night life for all it's worth, and he needs fresh material. He knows this. He practically sneers at the obviousness of the idea all through this book.

But we are still being asked to gulp down second-rate goods like they're the best McInerney can give us. Inside jokes from literary Manhattan just aren't enough, especially in McInerney's hodgepodge of a title novel.

McInerney, despite what some might say, is too good for this, too good to slip into the flaccid self-awareness of someone convinced of the a priori superiority of anything he writes just because it comes from him. Would it have been such a terrible thing to toss this entire novel into the recycle bin, and get to work on something a little fresher?

Talent carries with it responsibility. Not just in ``Bright Lights'' but in the lost-young-man- in-Japan-novel ``Ransom,'' written earlier and published later, McInerney announced himself as a talent to watch. Let's hope this lazy wink-in-the-mirror-of-a-novel, with its yeah- you've-really-got-it grin, amounts to a literary midlife crisis, and that we can look forward to whole new phase of McInerney's writing life.

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This article appeared on page RV - 5 of the San Francisco Chronicle