Model Behavior
Readers familiar with Jay McInerney'sBright Lights Big Citymay feel a sense of déjà vu when readingModel Behavior.  Once again our hero is a small cog in the glamorous Manhattan media machine.  Yet although the players may look the same, the rules of the game have changed--their ambitions and expectations are not the same as they were a decade or more ago. Connor McKnight is not brought low by drugs and other symbols of 1980s-style excess; instead, his relationship is destroyed by premillennial ennui and the numbing effects of his career as a celebrity journalist (celebrity being to the '90s what cocaine was to the '80s).  The fact that all these shiny happy people really aren't happy at all is hardly news, but McInerney is both a chronicler and a satirist of this glitzy corner of the world, and his astute wit saves the novel from being as shallow as its subjects. This is not  poisonous satire à la Martin Amis but a more affectionate (yet equally effective) mocking of modern pretensions, such as P.G. Wodehouse in Hugo Boss. McInerney's comic timing is best demonstrated in one of the longest scenes,  a Thanksgiving dinner that ends in chaos when Connor's father exposes himself to the turkey-munching patrons of a tony Manhattan eatery.  While the author's sixth book may not be very far removed from his first, that isn't necessarily a criticism. Like a botanist who studies only pondweed, McInerney has narrowed his focus to perfect it.Model Behavior, and the seven stories collected with it, demonstrate that no one else can render this peculiar little social set as accurately, or as artfully as McInerney.--Simon Leake--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.