Hitchens hadn’t even finished reading Brightness Falls—it was late afternoon and he was de-icing the silver cocktail shaker preparatory to some old-fashioned, feet-up literary immersion—when his telephone trilled its urgent summons. A brisk voice inquired in a friendly but more than just inquisitive tone what precisely he meant by “profiling” Jay McInerney and what, in any case, he meant by reviewing a novel before its official publication date. This was Hitchens’ first ever call from Gary Fisketjon—he knew of people who had waited in vain for such a call from such a one—and the emotions of flattery and curiosity contended for mastery in his finely but oddly chiseled features. Cupping the mouthpiece, he whispered to the languid presence of Carol Azul, the exquisite screen-writer and Angeleña tour guide who had recently enhanced his happiness and undergirded his waning bicoastal appeal by consenting to become his bride, “Angel, it’s Fisketjon.” “Sometimes, pussy,” she purred, “you do say the strangest things. And don’t get me wrong, but isn’t it the teensiest bit early for that martini?”

Girls, of course, often didn’t understand. Ruled as they were by tides and zodiacs, they found the filiations of power and influence and networking to be obscure and even tedious. (They also failed to see the fuel-bearing character and possibility of gin and vermouth.) This was going to be man’s work. Stalling the power call from Manhattan—Fisketjon cared so little for the nation’s capital that he had allowed McInerney to describe the New York-Washington shuttle as operating from Dulles airport instead of National: a typical piece of Empire State solipsism—Hitchens dialed Julian Barnes in his London snooker speakeasy. The trans-Atlantic static gave place to the gruff, authoritative tones which had, to the wonder of many, infused the playful lightness of Flaubert’s Parrot. “Call me collect one more time, Hitch,” he quipped, “and I’ll break your arm.”

“Listen, Jules, I need a soundbite. Your mate McInerny seems to have a lot of protection. His Roman is very good, but it’s not as much à clef as I’d been told. Please advise.”

“The thing to notice,” said Barnes, “is that Jay’s literary development is completely disconnected from his social curve. I think the real curve—the writing curve—goes steadily upward. Whereas in terms of the literary-social melodrama, he’s seen as someone with a terrific early success who then wrote two dogs.”

Random Location

Abandoning his drink-sodden attempt at a pastiche, Hitchens decided to give the thing a straight review. “Early success,” of course, puts one in mind of Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote a haunting passage by that name in which he said that those who had experienced it were touched by a unique grace, and would never quite lose the idea that somewhere there was “a great carnival by the sea.” Mr. McInerney’s critical interest in Fitzgerald is now quite highly developed, and his new novel revolves around a doomed Scott and Zelda pair who strive for different kinds of happiness during the pseudo-gilded age that was the moral squalor of the Reagan era.

Russell and Corinne are a sort of coalminer’s canary couple. People watch them, in other words, as if they were a gauge or register of how the career and marriage mixture is working. Russell’s place of work is described as being “located in one of those interstitial regions of the city which until recently had been nameless . . . south of midtown but not properly downtown.”

“Haphazard might be a word for this placement. “Random” might, perhaps, be another. Julian Barnes may be right in decoupling Mr. McInerney’s fiction from his life, but anyone who knows the publishing racket is still going to be spotting the members of the real-world literary bestiary. There is what could be a misprint in my copy, where a reference is made to the industry of “Proesy and pose.” Mistake or not, it ought to stay in. Here we meet cynical ex-radicals on the make, Jewish paranoid belletrists who spend a Borgesian life-time constructing unreadable fictional labyrinths and cool black dudes who lend cred, absorb the diss and split the diff. Also, since this is set in the age of the arbitrage casino and the reign of funny money, there are some lycanthropic Bonfire ingredients lying combustibly about the place.

The public clef therefore organizes itself around the general rancid hubris of the 1980’s, with a rather stilted nod or obeisance to matters like the Tompkins Square homeless and the parallel immiseration of whatever we agree to call “the less fortunate.” Corinne, Russell’s wife, is the one who cares about all this while working on Wallstrasse, so it takes a while for us to realize that she is a venomous pain in the ass: “Corinne was getting so tired of parties: dinner parties, birthday parties, publication parties, housewarming parties; holiday and theme parties . . . ”

This, with its semiconscious echo of Nina in Vile Bodies, makes us wonder what may come to be the point of the divine Corinne. She likes to kvetch about how Russell is too pooped to screw, but she also wants to make murmurous noises about motherhood. This parallel narrative, with its awful acuity about what happens when, as Shakespeare has it, you may discern a hot friend cooling, is the major rather than minor clef in the story. In other words, private miseries in obscure places—a desperate friend’s room is described by Mr. McInerney as looking “like a campground that has been worked over by bears”—play out much better than public faces in public places.

Still, there are some good period and contemporary insights. I clapped my little flippers together and exclaimed in praise when one of the characters observed that: “If figures of speech based on sport and fornication were suddenly banned, American corporate communication would be reduced to pure mathematics.” In general, though, the epochal context is mannered, and plays to what people already believe themselves to know. Bernie Melman, the fat, vulgar shark and LBO artist, is a no-sweat portrait to anyone who has gone so far as to see Danny DeVito in Other People’s Money. The depiction of little-mindedness in male-female and husband-wife teasing and nagging, however, belongs to all ages.

These two tracks of the story never quite converge well enough (except insofar as spouses are famously jealous of the loved one’s work life) and have some trouble finding their resolution. The phony Jewish “novelist” is merely killed off after the joke about his circular productivity has worn thin. A tremendously charged French babe is introduced, shoes high promise of giving Russell a hard time, and disappears. On some sun-drenched Caribbean hell-spot where they go for running repairs, Corinne promises Russell some quality time and the blowjob of a lifetime and then apparently forgets all about the idea. I myself—do you ever feel like this?—have a tendency to resent plot-teasing of this sort.

In its public dimension, the story is building toward the Big Crash of junk money, and the parallel or related eclipse of the epicene “mutual friend” Jeff, who has the faculty of being adored by men and loved by women but who has a better idea, namely chemical and narcotic self-destruction. Again, the end of poor old Jeff is more affecting by far than the stripping bare of the poor old asset market. And let’s hope for everybody’s sake that the scenes from rehab life are not drawn from anything but the literary imagination.

‘Perfect Pitch’

“Notice,” said Julian Barnes, “how Jay has perfect pitch. His ear is almost infallible.” Especially in the mature repartee this is true, and in the in-your-face exchanges between Washington Lee and both his white-boy friends and homeboy critics hilariously true. Mr. McInerney knows that gross expectations lead to gross encounters, and he can let the characters trip over the fact themselves without too much rib-nudgings. I understand that he once gravely disappointed a wife of his, and if this is so then I am impressed by the way in which he can write from the wounded female’s point of view. Now that does make a call upon one’s pitch, to say nothing of one’s perfection . . .

Ignoring, or perhaps better say resisting, a heavy-lidded glance from Carol Azul, Hitchens gave the silver shaker a gelid twirl. Encouraging sloshing noises proceeded from within (from within the shaker, that is). “Look here,” he said grandly to Fisketjon, “I can’t believe you’re holding this book until June. I bet it’s in the stores before then. But if you do have time, let me save you from a blunder. Victor Propp the fraud is described as being in his 60’s and also as having a father who claimed descent from Isaac babel. Now if Babel had lived he could still technically be alive, so if you’re going to make not one but two learned references to Russian Jewish letter, you had better . . . Hullo? Hullo? Hullo . . . operator?