Little Jay: Happy at Last : The Rake of Lower Manhattan Has a New Wife (No. 3), a New Novel (No. 4) and a New Home (Very Far South of SoHo)

IT IS MATURITY ABOVE ALL THINGS THAT THE AMERICAN writer fears,” declared the critic Leslie A. Fiedler, “and marriage seems to him its essential sign.”

This was written about the likes of Melville, Twain and Hemingway in the days before gender sensitivity, but the point hasn’t lost all currency. Jay McInerney, the bad-boy writer who with one slim novel, “Bright Lights, Big City,” achieved the status of representative bad-boy writer, has sometimes seemed intent on proving Fiedler right. Throughout the late ‘80s, his private life and public utterances, extensively chronicled in glossy magazines and New York gossip columns, appeared calculated to illustrate a flight from the drudgery of responsibility, whether marital or literary. Like his young, drug-addled characters, McInerney bounced in promiscuous double-time all over the nether regions of Manhattan, from chic Downtown eatery to chic Downtown club.

But that was then.

Right now, Jay McInerney is lost. He’s lost, and his car phone is on the fritz. Never mind--it’s a warm spring day in Nashville, and nobody really objects to driving in circles in a shiny blue Porsche with the top down and country music on the radio. If he could only call ahead, says McInerney in a mock-wistful tone, somebody at the restaurant could reel him in.

“Lost again,” he croons, as if about to launch into a fulsome ballad. “There are people who think it’s my natural state. And it’s funny,” he adds, “because when I write, I do get totally lost. It’s lucky if I know what’s going to happen two paragraphs ahead.”

Nobody could have predicted the plot twist that has landed McInerney in Tennessee. It seems grossly improbable that he should have traded in cosmopolitan glitz for a comfy provincial existence. “My friends are probably still taking bets,” he says, “on when I’m going to run screaming back to New York.” As a matter of fact, he’ll be in Manhattan for a six-month stint starting later this month, shortly before the publication of his fourth novel, “Brightness Falls.”

The new book, to be published by Knopf, is about a marriage. It’s also an ambitious elegy to the ‘80s in the vein of Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities,” McInerney putting his best foot forward, presenting his claim to maturity. He knows that with a critical success he could bury his image as a literary juvenile delinquent--at the ripe age of 37--and bid for some old-fashioned respect. If, on the other hand, this latest effort results only in disappointing reviews and weak sales--the sorry fate of his two previous novels, “Ransom” and “Story of My Life”--he might as well spend the rest of his days lost in a strange city on the Cumberland River.

“If ‘Brightness Falls’ doesn’t sell,” he says, “next year I’ll be driving a Nissan.”

McInerney knows how to get his bearings. He pulls over near a phone booth, leaving the Porsche halfway on the sidewalk, and calls home, a tidy stone-and-stucco cottage on a quiet street, to ask directions of Helen Bransford McInerney, his wife since two days after Christmas and the magnet that drew him from New York.

HE’S CHOSEN THE SUNSET GRILL, NASHVILLE’S TRENDIEST LUNCH SPOT. The owner greets him effusively, by his first name. Then he’s hailed by Kyle Lehning, the new boss of Asylum Records’ Nashville operation. In the 10 weeks since arriving in Music City, McInerney seems to have made the scene without learning the geography. By the time we’ve settled at a table in the center of the restaurant’s crowded patio, I’m convinced that a paraphrase of the old cigarette commercial covers the case: You can take McInerney out of Manhattan, but you can’t take Manhattan out of McInerney.

That doesn’t mean he’s oblivious to his surroundings. “This restaurant is kind of a hub of the music industry,” he says, looking around at the clientele. “You can see it doesn’t take long to know everybody. Well, not everybody. I mean, I don’t know Randy Travis, for instance, but I probably will if I stay here for a year.” He’s known country singer Jimmy Buffett for years, he explains, and Buffett’s been introducing him around.

McInerney isn’t one to lower his voice for discretion’s sake. As he wrote of the protagonist of “Brightness Falls,” he “didn’t talk, he boomed.” McInerney booms a great deal about being a so-called spokesman for his generation. “A dirty and thankless job,” he says. “It means that for me that I’m essentially having sex in public when I write.” Having said as much, he reconsiders. Perhaps he wasn’t a spokesman, exactly. He comes up at last with a lament that satisfies him. “I became a little too much a symbol for the era I was writing about and living in.”

Born in Hartford, Conn., in 1955 to a family every bit as Irish as the name implies, McInerney had a peripatetic childhood. His father, a paper-company executive, carted the family all over the globe before settling in Pittsfield, Mass., where Jay attended public high school. Later, at Williams College, he was an avowed aspiring writer. McInerney’s immediate postgraduate career was hardly a success. He was a reporter at a New Jersey newspaper and a fact-checker at the New Yorker, which fired him, before enrolling in the writers’ program at Syracuse University, where he studied with the late Raymond Carver.

Vintage Contemporaries, the publisher of “Bright Lights,” estimates that the novel has sold more than 1 million copies worldwide, a paperback bolt from the blue in the fall of 1984, making an instant celebrity of its 29-year-old author.

The novel’s nameless protagonist, an aspiring writer spinning his wheels and spinning out of control, was taken for an autobiographical portrait. The typical McInerney evening, therefore, was thought to be a romp through Clubland fueled by Bolivian marching powder. “I would get these calls--whole fraternities would come down to New York--they were expecting me to go out on the town with them and do ‘Bright Lights,’ ” he remembers. “That’s when I got an unlisted number.” That’s also when the gossip columnists started tracking his comings and goings.

The critics were very kind to McInerney until the scope of his success and his unabashed delight in it became apparent. The reviews of “Ransom,” his 1985 novel about an American expatriate in Japan, were mixed at best. Three years later, “Story of My Life” was greeted with a chorus of Bronx cheers and a few noises equally rude but malicious too. A few lonely contrarians praised the voice of the narrator, a wasted young woman called Alison Poole whose wanderings constituted another late-night tour of New York’s Downtown scene. But to most critics, her virtuoso command of Valley-speak seemed just another sign that McInerney had been listening very hard to the very vapid.

Despite the critics, McInerney remains a money writer. Hollywood adapted “Bright Lights” for the screen (though the Michael J. Fox vehicle bombed), and the novel continues to sell more than 30,000 copies annually. As long as it does, McInerney will have an income as well as the magical ability to loosen publishers’ purse strings, magic he no doubt worked for “Brightness Falls.” “Even if this novel were to fail,” says Daniel Max, publishing columnist for Weekly Variety and the New York Observer, “when it comes time to negotiate a new contract, Jay could still command an advance in the mid-six figures.”

The damning judgment of reviewers did nothing to deflate the enthusiasm of New York’s paparazzi either, who hounded McInerney no matter what the current value of his literary stock. The state of his marriage--to Merry E. Reymond, a graduate student in philosophy--was a topic of particular interest. (This was his second marriage. His first ended in 1981, lasting a matter of months.) In 1987, after separating from Merry, he started seeing model Marla Hanson. Their liaison was tabloid heaven: In 1986 Hanson had been slashed and disfigured in a widely publicized razor attack.

For his part, McInerney hardly avoided the limelight. He appeared on the cover of Esquire in July of 1989, the writer poised in midair, wielding a samurai sword above the caption “Jay McInerney Skewers His Critics.” Inside was his long, peevish defense of the so-called Brat Pack writers (Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz and McInerney himself) against the dirty digs of a handful of prominent critics. “Hemorrhoidal gatekeepers,” he called them. He drew a dubious opposition between these fusty “guardians of culture” and a freewheeling band of fun-loving but much-maligned young authors.

But none of this could have prepared McInerney for the April, 1990, issue of Spy magazine, in which ex-wife Merry offered up intimate details of their failed marriage. She recounted the familiar pathetic story, in this case spiced with drugs, drink and infidelity, of a dedicated wife who helps her husband through the lean years only to lose him once he’s rich and famous.

At the dawn of the ‘90s, after two failed books, two failed marriages and a movie that flopped, McInerney had reached a low point.

ABOUT TWO YEARS AGO, FRIENDS NOTE, MCINERNEY SEEMED TO REDEDICATE himself to his writing career. Andre Balazs, owner of Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont hotel and co-owner of M.K., a now-defunct New York nightclub McInerney frequented in its glory days, shared a Long Island beach house with him during the summer of 1990. The writer was at work on “Brightness Falls,” and very serious about it. “One thing that has certainly changed,” Balazs reports, “is that you don’t see him out at night nearly as much. Jay had been a fixture out there.”

Another sign of the new seriousness: Last year, in the New York Review of Books (home to many a stalwart culture guardian), he published a substantial, keenly observed essay on the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. McInerney likes to encourage comparisons between his career and Fitzgerald’s. It’s a bad idea, mainly because Fitzgerald’s best writing is clearly great writing--not a distinction one could claim for the author of “Bright Lights,” no matter how many copies the book sells. McInerney knows that he hasn’t written anything on a par with “Gatsby,” yet he can’t help identifying with this early exemplar of the author as celebrity. There was more to publishing a semi-scholarly essay than simple self-promotion. “I’m sometimes amazed by the notion that I’m some kind of illiterate, hairy barbarian,” he says, digging into his heaping plate of Voodoo Pasta in a hurried but civilized fashion. Dressed in a polo shirt and a well-tailored blue blazer, he seems nothing like a barbarian, though he does have luxuriously thick and wavy dark hair. He points out that he was a year and a half into a Ph.D. program in English literature at Syracuse when “Bright Lights” was published. The Fitzgerald essay, he says, “was partly an attempt to reclaim the part of myself that grapples with trying to find a place in the American literary tradition, as opposed to someone who’s chronicling what clothes people are wearing south of Houston Street.”

His hopes for “Brightness Falls” are similar, though more tentatively expressed: “I’ll be happy,” he says, “if I get past the PR problems of the last few years and get people to look seriously at the book and stop worrying about who I’m sleeping with and where I’m eating and what I’m wearing.” The novel is sufficient to the task in the sense that McInerney has chosen to write about adults trying their best in an adult world. There’s not a single nightclub scene in 420 pages.

He tells the story of Russell and Corrine Calloway, sentient yuppies in the yuppie heyday before the 1987 stock-market crash. She’s a beautiful stockbroker with a social conscience; he’s a book editor, athletic and intellectually engaged. When Russell’s job sours, he does the true ‘80s thing. He invites a corporate raider to stage a hostile takeover of the publishing company where he works. The plot allows plenty of room for a panoramic depiction of the era, from the homeless to the buyout kings. Heartless Manhattan thrives.

And the Calloways’ marriage wobbles, if only because the times are unfriendly to matrimony. Once Russell has stepped into the funny-money world of leverage, he’s beset by temptation. He finds no guidance; ethics, professional and sexual, have all but vanished. His moral soul is imperiled. A subplot traces the sad path taken by the Calloways’ best friend, a charming, feckless young writer who’s had a stunning McInerney-style success and now indulges his every whim, which includes many women and all kinds of drugs. Exorcising the spirit of this bad-boy writer is one of the novel’s principal projects.

Has McInerney overcompensated? Has he produced a tidy morality tale for dull and dutiful grown-ups? Not quite. “Brightness Falls” is a lively, cleverly written entertainment, though perhaps dated. The bittersweet saga of Russell and Corrine will likely silence the critics eager to pan whatever he publishes, but probably won’t hoist him any higher in the opinion of the culture guardians he pretends to despise.

“Brightness Falls” is also very much a roman a clef . This will be apparent only to readers familiar with the ins and outs of New York publishing. There are characters who resemble Erroll McDonald, executive editor of Pantheon Books; Jason Epstein, editorial director of Random House, and writer Harold Brodkey. The caricatured literati should have no trouble recognizing themselves. Some of them won’t be happy. McInerney shrugs. “I’d hate to write a novel that didn’t piss somebody off.”

We linger over coffee, outlasting the other customers on the patio. Climbing back into the Porsche, McInerney offers a tour of Nashville’s grandest neighborhood. With only minor navigational trouble, he finds his way to a huge Greek Revival mansion that’s open to tourists and evidently much visited. “This is the house where my wife’s mother was born,” he says. “Helen wears it very lightly, but her family is all mixed up in the history around here. It gives me a point of entry into this culture, this landscape. We all wish we were Southern writers. At least I always did.”

HELEN BRANSFORD MCINERNEY EATS POPCORN WITH A SPOON. SHE’S IN THE bright kitchen of her house, perched on a stool, telling the story of her romance with her husband. She has the faintest trace of a Southern accent and a happy voice, clear as a bell. No description will suit her as well as the single word charming . Her husband leans against a counter and listens with a fond, just-married smile. Sometimes he interrupts.

They’ve known each other since 1984, but they were always “just friends”--until last fall, when Marla Hanson moved out of McInerney’s apartment. Helen is a successful jewelry designer. She kept a pied-a-terre near the diamond district when she left Manhattan in 1990 to move back to Nashville, where she grew up. She was in New York on business in November.

“Jay had called me a few weeks before,” she says, gesturing with her popcorn spoon, “and he sounded so lost and bewildered that when I got to town, I invited him to the movies with some friends. The next morning he called me again, and he still sounded lost and bewildered.”

“Then there was that dinner,” says her husband, “and that was it.”

The wedding ceremony, a little more than a month later, was an unannounced trip to New York’s City Hall, accompanied only by Vanity Fair writer Marie Brenner and her daughter, old friends. The McInerneys say they had hoped to keep the marriage secret, but the papers reported it anyway.

The gossip columnists’ tender attentions haven’t slackened since he moved to Nashville. At Helen’s insistence, McInerney got a nose job--not cosmetic, they say, and it’s true that the nose still sits slightly crooked on his face. The operation was meant to repair a deviated septum and cure his thunderous snoring. News of the septorhinoplasty leaked all the way up to New York’s tabloid press. “I thought it would be fun to keep a file of all the clippings from our first year together,” says Helen. (If “Brightness Falls” elicits the same kind of reviews as “Story of My Life,” she may change her mind.)

They plan to spend only six months of the year in Nashville. She seems to worry that he’ll get bored in the provinces. She’s 44, seven years older than he is, and has lived long enough in New York to know that she doesn’t want to do it year-round. No stranger to demi-celebrity, Helen has dated novelist and screenwriter William Goldman, Hollywood deal-maker Ron Meyer of Creative Artists Agency and Isaac Tigrett, a founder of the Hard Rock Cafe. I ask if this is her first marriage. “I was married for about five months when I was 20,” she says, and thinks a bit. “Maybe I was 19.”

And now, maybe, it is time to settle down. Over lunch her husband confessed he’d been smitten the moment he set eyes on her, almost eight years ago. “It’s great that we didn’t get together until now,” he said. “I would have screwed it up. I would hate to have made her live through what was one of the longer adolescences in American history.”