There was a time, after the publication of his debut novel Bright Lights, Big City in 1984, when it seemed Jay McInerney could go to seed. The autobiographical work recounted the coke-fuelled nightlife of a New Yorker fact-checker, sold more than a million copies and defined the spirit of the exuberant 1980s. But what does an epoch-definer do once he has defined his epoch?
Await the backlash, in McInerney's case. His follow-up novels, Ransom (1985) and Story of My Life (1988), were received tepidly in the US. The 1988 film of Bright Lights, starring a miscast Michael J. Fox, was a monumental flop. Nor did it bode well for McInerney to be constantly compared with his hero F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was anointed the voice of the jazz age on the publication of This Side of Paradise in 1920.
Like McInerney, Fitzgerald was known as much for his carousing as for his novels about the hedonistic rich, and he died an alcoholic at 44. What gin was to Fitzgerald, Bolivian marching powder became to McInerney and his contemporaries. There was a risk that McInerney's hard-partying ways would catch up with him, too, as the go-go years gave way to the jaded 90s and left their literary spokesman behind.
But of all the literary brat pack - the label applied to writers such as Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz, who satirised their generation's mores - McInerney maintained the highest profile, partly due to his star-studded social life and his willingness to indulge gossip columnists. But it was also because foreign critics kept trumpeting his work.
'There's a less hysterical reaction to my books in Europe,' McInerney says. 'They're treated more as literary events and less as new instalments in Jay McInerney's autobiography.' We're chatting in the spacious sitting room of his Lower East Side penthouse. McInerney is 54 and his waist has thickened, but he remains boyish and is smartly dressed in a blue shirt and black suede loafers. It has been said that every time McInerney writes a book, he gets a new girlfriend and a new apartment.
He moved here two years ago, about the time he married his fourth wife, publishing heiress Anne Hearst, and released his seventh novel, The Good Life. 'For the first time almost that I can remember, I'm pretty serene,' he says.