Jay McInerney reads aloud about a man snorting Bolivian marching powder.

His voice carries well, perfect for the public reading in Grant Auditorium last Wednesday. McInerney could be reading about anything besides cocaine use and still keep an audience engaged. His voice inflects emotion in all the right places.

He seems to have the text memorized – after all, this used to be his life.

McInerney was thrust into the media spotlight after publishing his debut novel in 1984, the semi-autobiographical ‘Bright Lights, Big City.’ It was one of the first books to describe the 1980s New York social scene in vivid detail, from clubbing to recreational drug use.

The book was published while McInerney was still a student in Syracuse University’s creative writing master’s program.

‘I was writing about glamorous and decadent stuff,’ McInerney said. ‘But that was my life – I didn’t really think about it that much.’

‘Bright Lights, Big City’ not only marked the beginning of McInerney’s literary career but also the start of a contentious relationship with the New York media.

McInerney was photographed all across New York City, in nightclubs and bars with beautiful women on his arm. To aspiring writers, McInerney’s life was everything they could dream of – achieving both critical success and public fame.

‘New York City was the center of that generation,’ said Chris Kennedy, poet and director of the SU creative writing department. ‘It was the place to be, the club scene was big. People wanted to know what it was like there.’

The relationship between McInerney and New York City was a precarious one. It offered him inspiration for his novels, but the club and drug lifestyle was having an effect on his personal life.

McInerney has been married four times, once to a model and twice to other writers. He briefly moved to Tennessee. But soon after his divorce from his third wife in 2000, McInerney became depressed. Writer’s block hit soon after.

‘No matter what has happened to him, he’s never departed from his original goal,’ said George Saunders, four-time winner of the National Magazine Award for fiction and a creative writing professor at SU. ‘And that was to be a novelist.’

Since the success of ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ McInerney’s life has been an incessant battle to get away from his 1980s persona of decadence. But his career started simply enough – he just liked writing.

McInerney said he remembers becoming interested in writing seriously at age 5. Then his ninth grade English teacher introduced him to poet Dylan Thomas, and McInerney began considering writing as a career.

‘Though I still knew that becoming a writer is not a very practical thing ever,’ McInerney said.

Still, the Hartford, Conn., native stayed within the writing world. After graduating from Williams College in Massachusetts, he became a fact checker at The New Yorker, the prestigious magazine of long-form journalism and fiction.

But that didn’t last long. McInerney was fired from the magazine and found himself studying creative writing at Syracuse University.

‘I went to Syracuse with my tail between my legs,’ McInerney said. ‘It was a great refuge for me. I wasn’t getting much fiction work done when I was working all the time in New York.’

While at SU, McInerney studied under Raymond Carver, who played a large role in bringing back the short story to the literary world in the 1980s. Carver met McInerney while he was still at The New Yorker and helped persuade McInerney to come to Syracuse.

While still studying at Syracuse, McInerney published ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ which was met with much critical and media acclaim.

‘I was an aspiring writer in Amarillo, Texas, when I saw Jay’s picture in People,’ Saunders said. ‘I’d never seen a writer in a magazine before. The next morning, I went and bought ‘Bright Lights, Big City,’ and I thought it was such a bold look at what was an incredibly interesting world to me.’

McInerney wrote the novel in second person, an unusual narrative technique in fiction. This made it easy for readers to recognize McInerney as the main character, though that wasn’t his original intention.

‘It was actually sort of an accident,’ McInerney said. ‘I got home from a nightclub and wrote down a few sentences about what happened that night. Then I woke up the next morning and saw it was in second person, but I figured it would revert back to normal narrative. But it never did, and I liked it.’

‘Bright Lights’ was the launching point for McInerney’s successful literary career. He has published nine books since his debut, two of them nonfiction essay collections on wine. But a common thread that can be found throughout nearly all of McInerney’s books is a New York City setting.

‘Every writer has their own turf,’ McInerney said. ‘Faulkner had his little corner of Mississippi, and Carver had the Pacific Northwest. For me, it’s New York City.’

After returning to the Big Apple, McInerney published ‘How It Ended’ in 2001, a collection of short stories that focused on average Americans dark pursuits at the American Dream.

And then disaster struck what had become the center of McInerney’s personal and literary world.

But that heartbreak ultimately became inspiration for McInerney. He wrote ‘The Good Life’ in 2006, a love story between two New Yorkers that takes place before, during and after the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

‘Initially, 9/11 seemed like the opposite of inspiration,’ McInerney said. ‘Fiction seemed like a frivolous pursuit. But then it seemed like there was a great survival story there, and the best way to tell it was through the lives of ordinary people.’

‘The Good Life’ was apart of English and Textual Studies 107, Living Writers, where students read books and then meet the authors who come to class for a reading and question-and-answer session. The reason McInerney came to SU last Wednesday was to speak to students and read an excerpt from ‘Bright Lights.’

‘My students really responded to the characters,’ said Aimee Pokwatka, a teaching assistant for Living Writers and a creative writing graduate student. ‘They were people the students could relate to – and of course, the love story was a part of that attraction.’

‘Bright Lights, Big City’ is a drastically different book from ‘The Good Life.’ Though they both take place in New York City and deal with the lives of New Yorkers, ‘Bright Lights’ is bold and bombastic in a way that ‘The Good Life’ could never be.

‘It’s hard to imagine a book like that having an impact now,’ Saunders said. ‘Writers in the media – that doesn’t happen anymore. But it’s still what every young writer wants.’

McInerney, 55, is no longer that young writer plastered all over the tabloids. Now he looks like the antithesis of someone who was a regular in the New York club scene.

His face is ruddy, and patches of gray lace his thick, black hair. He’s aged gracefully and is handsome in that distinguished, Robert Redford sort of way. McInerney’s square-rimmed glasses hang off the tip of his nose. And when he reads from his first novel, his voice is strong yet detached, like he’s narrating a stranger’s life – after all, he’s not that person anymore.

He doesn’t write about doing cocaine in clubs, and he’s no longer photographed with pretty, young socialites. He’s married again (to publishing heiress Anne Hearst) and has twins. McInerney’s novels have gone from depicting debauchery to one of the nation’s darkest hours.

‘I feel somewhat lucky to have had that kind of exposure,’ McInerney said. ‘(Pulitzer Prize-winning author) Norman Mailer once told me the only thing worse than having a public persona was to not have one at all.’

Published on November 12, 2007 at 12:00 pm