Jay McInerney (MAK-ih-nur-nee) achieved remarkable early success and celebrity with the publication of his first novel and has spent his career attempting to live up to that initial achievement. Born into the upper middle class, the son of an international corporate executive, McInerney grew up in several different cities, including London, England, and Vancouver, Canada, and attended eighteen elementary schools before attending high school in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He completed his undergraduate degree at Williams College with a major in philosophy and a minor in English. After graduation, he and his good friend Gary Fisketjon (who later became his editor at Random House) hit the road, traveling throughout the United States and working at various odd jobs. As a reporter for the Hunterdon County Democrat newspaper in New Jersey, McInerney labored more over his prose than the facts, and his tenure there was brief.

Finding himself at loose ends, in 1977 McInerney traveled to Japan on a Princeton-in-Asia Fellowship, taking Japanese courses at the Institute for International Studies outside Tokyo and teaching English at Kyoto University. This two-year sojourn in Japan provided the budding author not only with material for his second novel but also with the traditional literary expatriate experience as well. In Japan he developed a keen interest in the martial arts, and he married his half-Japanese girlfriend, model Linda Rossiter.

In 1979 the couple moved to New York City to pursue their respective careers of writing and modeling. To support himself while writing, McInerney worked as a fact-checker for The New Yorker. Fired after seven months, he went to work as a freelance reader for Random House. During this period McInerney plunged headlong into the thriving New York City club scene; he later vividly recounted these experiences in Bright Lights, Big City.

By 1981 McInerney’s wife had left him, and his writing was taking a back seat to night life when his friend Fisketjon introduced him to writer Raymond Carver, who was then teaching at Syracuse University. Carver suggested that McInerney leave the distracting atmosphere of New York City and become one of his students at Syracuse. McInerney spent three years studying under Carver and met his second wife, Merry Reymond, a Ph.D. student in philosophy, at Syracuse.

He began writing seriously during this period, in 1982 publishing “It’s Six a.m. Do You Know Where You Are?” in the Paris Review. Based on his experiences in New York City, it became the beginning of Bright Lights, Big City, which he wrote in a three-month burst of creativity in 1983, and which Random House decided to publish in 1984 as the first original work in its Vintage Contemporaries trade paperback series. The novel was a phenomenal success, gaining both critical and popular acclaim. McInerney’s use of the unusual second-person narrator and the present tense, his humor, and acute social commentary were noted and admired by the critics.

With the publication of his first novel McInerney gained considerable celebrity, and he was often referred to as part of the “literary brat pack,” which included fellow writers Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz. These writers appeared in the gossip columns, posed for fashion layouts, and even endorsed products. When the film version of Bright Lights, Big City, starring Michael J. Fox, was released in 1988, McInerney’s celebrity was probably at its peak.

Bright Lights, Big City was followed in 1985 by Ransom, a more conventionally structured novel than his first, based on his experiences in Japan. Ransom probably suffered from a backlash caused by the popularity of his first novel; it received mixed reviews and...