Home again in the Big City

On a cloudy day in the meatpacking district, images of the old world -- men in bloody aprons, lonely figures with upturned collars walking down by the Hudson -- blur into those of the new: freakishly tall blonds 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 this, his chosen neighborhood, his adopted hometown within a town.

“As the tired lights drain into the western suburbs beyond the river,” he writes in one story, “The Queen and I,” “the rotting pier at the end of Gansevoort Street begins to shudder and groan with life. From inside a tin-roofed warehouse, human beings stagger out into the steamy dusk like bats leaving their cave.”

These days, the pier has been severely dolled up. The Maxwell House sign across the river is, to the author’s disappointment, gone. Like the eyeglass billboard in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” it was iconic, something fixed in a changing landscape.

In much the same way as Fitzgerald, McInerney has always believed in living among the people he writes about -- transvestites in the meatpacking district, fundraisers on the Upper East Side, heirs in the South, hipsters wasting their lives at West Village clubs. The research has been intensive and, at times, exhausting. As it was for Fitzgerald.

McInerney is on his fourth marriage -- he has two children with his third wife, Helen Bransford -- and he’s 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.)

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 for a few days with friends.

“I was burned out on New York in the 1980s, sick of it in the 1990s,” McInerney explains, but the city earned his respect after Sept. 11. “I feel sorry for people who missed it. You really felt part of a community.”

McInerney looks out from the roof of Soho House, a lower Manhattan club to which writers gravitate. He likes to come here in the summer, when everyone has left New York.

“This is my beach,” he says. He’s hoping the economic downturn will cleanse New York of investment banker culture, making room for a return of artists and bohemians. “In the end of the 1970s,” he says, “this was a landscape of drug dealers.” He shrugs. “At least I got a couple of books out of it.”

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.” His father, an executive at a paper company, read the gossip columns featuring his son and worried.

Even now, the author hasn’t really stopped partying. Last night, he was out until 2 a.m. with friends.

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. “Look,” he says, “people pick up books for two reasons: entertainment and edification. I don’t set out with a didactic purpose. At most, you hope to illuminate what it is to be human. Fiction distills, shapes, abstracts the flow of experience and sensation. All this time, 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, as a paperback original, in 1984. The saga of a young fact checker at a New Yorker-like magazine who spends his nights on club binges fueled by “Bolivian marching powder,” the book was written in second person, and seemed to signal a new sensibility in which the road of excess led not, as William Blake would have it, to the palace of wisdom, but to a desiccated numbness instead.

In the ensuing quarter-century, 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 spoiled rich kids 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 almost entirely for his first book. So long is the shadow of “Bright Lights, Big City” that few people noticed when, in 2006, McInerney actually wrote a novel about human goodness: the post-Sept. 11 book “The Good Life,” which takes place in the first three months after the attack.

“I suppose I sympathize with my characters too much,” McInerney admits. “I don’t find it useful simply to ridicule the people around me. I’m not a coldblooded satirist. In some ways Alison Poole was terribly shallow and silly, but few of us are truly evil. Writing is an act of empathy, not criticism.”

Perhaps much of McInerney’s writing has been about the failure to be true to one’s best self? “Actually,” the author counters, “infidelity has been a major theme, not just in my books but in literature. Of course, I had a more romantic view of male-female relations in my 20s. Back then, infidelity was hard to comprehend.”

Many of the stories in “How It Ended” are about failed relationships, failures in communication. “Bliss is hard to portray,” he growls.

McInerney’s characters reappear throughout his stories and novels. (Alison Poole even popped up in his friend Bret Easton Ellis’ novel, “Lunar Park.”) 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 last 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 burned in the beginning of the current 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’s one of McInerney’s friends calling to ask if he should bring his fishing gear to the Turks and Caicos. There’s another call about a remake of the movie “Bright Lights, Big City” that will begin shooting this fall. 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?”

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com