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“... Why is it so difficult to sustain a literary career in America? Joyce proposed that Ireland is an old sow who devours her young; America sometimes seems to resemble a meat-packing corporation that bloats its animals with hormones and chemical hype before slitting their throats. ‘There are no second acts in American lives,’ said F. Scott Fitzgerald, archetype of the American artist betrayed by the Judas kiss of fame, his early work overpraised, he himself declared a has-been just as he was achieving mastery ...”

“... It would be interesting to place Jay McInerney and David Holbrook as neighbours at E.M. Forster’s imaginary table. Both novelists are fascinated by decadence – that much they have in common. But their diagnoses and anatomies of the decadent condition are quite different; worlds apart, to use Holbrook’s dominant image ...”

“... but it could just as easily – apart perhaps from its humourless tone – come from Jay McInerney’s new novel, Ransom, whose eponymous hero has fled ‘modern America’ for the ‘beauty, refinement, and truly civilised quality’ of a traditional Japanese school. Not a school for monks, but a karate school, a place of combined ‘work ...”

“... Talking to Jay McInerney in 1992, the year South of the Border, West of the Sun was published in Japanese, Haruki Murakami said that he wasn’t so much an international writer, as a non-national writer: ‘You might call it the Japanese nature that remains only after you have thrown out, one after another, all those parts that are altogether too “Japanese” ...”

“... is material here for a sustained 500-page narrative rather than a Carveresque short story. As for McInerney, we have grown so used to thinking of him as a purveyor of brittle, epigrammatic fictions that there is an immediate sense of unease in seeing his characteristic milieu, preoccupations and ironies suddenly being given the full-blown neo-Dickensian ...”

“... House editor who created the trade paperback series Vintage Contemporaries, the springboard for Jay McInerney’s breakthrough novel, Bright Lights, Big City, and Morgan Entrekin, the editor at Simon and Schuster who acquired Bret Easton Ellis’s Less than Zero. Lish had the cult cred, but their properties shone the brightest. Gary and Morgan, Morgan ...”

“... of the Hemingway-Carver line; weightier than the snivelling of yesterday’s golden boys like Jay McInerney, more honest than the calculated revel in social anomie of an absent author like Brett Easton Ellis. With the layering and transformation of memory that recur in Fucking Martin and The Law of Enclosures, Peck succeeds not only in establishing a ...”

“... Hankinson has chosen a different model: a snazzy second-person narration, of the kind used by Jay McInerney in Bright Lights, Big City. He has also chosen – this seems to be his own innovation – to rely heavily on square brackets. The story proper begins with Moat’s release from Durham Prison, where he was serving a short sentence for ...”

“... nice, but can’t you sex it up a bit? Write it in the second person maybe? That did wonders for Jay McInerney. Hamid: You fool, that would completely ruin it … [He pauses, then looks up, alert, as though suddenly inspired] Hamid: In a way that will illustrate my point perfectly! [He cackles] Self-help is a $13 billion industry; literary ...”

“... gave me the original impetus to consider the possibility of writing a novel’. In 1985, he told Jay McInerney: ‘I got really interested in the whole process, and thought, I wish I had written this book. I started writing stories about two years after she published her novel.’ He translated Sartre’s Huis Clos and Borges’s story ‘The Circular ...”

“... But even then it was obvious that Saunders wasn’t interested in snark for snark’s sake. Jay McInerney, reviewing CivilWarLand for the New York Times, recognised him as ‘one of those rare writers who can effortlessly blend satire and sentiment’. The shape of that sentiment became increasingly clear. In a eulogy for David Foster Wallace, who ...”

“... a marketable context; or the Brat Pack writers of the late Eighties, whose three ‘founders’, Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz, remain its only viable practitioners; or the so-called New Narrativists of the first half of this decade, writers as diverse in talent and sensibility as Rebecca Brown, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, Gary ...”

“... when our ship failed to come in, claim we had hated all along. Ellis provided them, and so did Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz and others: these were writers who shared a sensibility and social milieu; they came to be identified with the same unsavoury behaviour of their characters. They were declared spokespeople for a generation that, once the initial ...”

“... alighted in Japan, the results have usually been disastrous. At the peak of his Manhattan success, Jay McInerney came out to study karate and produced the dismal Ransom, full of sub-Hemingway machismo and lumbering Japonaiserie (‘he picked up his katana, made by the great swordsmith Yasukuni of the Soshu Branch of the Sagami School’). The best that ...”

“... of the mid-1980s craze for what Wallace called ‘conspicuously young’ first-time novelists: Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, writers Wallace despised. His next book, Girl with Curious Hair (1989), saw him starting to focus his brainpower in haunting, enduringly strange tales of television, flatness, chemical and electrical ...”