Rating: 
Summary: Don't take this one to a desert island!
Review: I've read everything Jay McInerney has written, but I was VERY disappointed by this one. Might be enjoyed by people in solitary confinement with nothing except cereal packets to read.
Rating: 
Summary: Clever Storytelling!
Review: If you like the style of McInerney, then I wouldn't discourage anyone from buying the paperback or a used version of this book. I would just skip the title and read the short stories. Some of them are up there with Carver!
-Borden Burns
Rating: 
Summary: short stories are better than novella
Review: If you like the style of McInerney, then I wouldn't discourage anyone from buying the paperback or a used version of this book. I would just skip the title and read the short stories. Some of them are up there with Carver!
-Borden Burns
Rating: 
Summary: Another hilarious slice of NYC from McInerney
Review: In "Model Behavior" McInerney's NYC characters are just as miserable as usual, only this time it is played strictly for laughs, lacking the dramatic punch of "Bright Lights, Big City."The hero Connor McKnight has a supermodel girlfriend who has left him and a career that has been put on hold since hs is too busy boozing and trying to improve the life of his anorexic sister and his miserable yet successful best-selling novelist friend. Connor's insecurities are hilariously played out, and there is a scene at a family dinner that is perhaps the funniest thing I've ever read in a novel. McInerney's characters are hilarious and pathetic all at once, kind of like a lighter, brighter version of Bret Easton Ellis. A quick and fufilling read.
Rating:
Summary: McInerney Delivers His Finest Novel Yet
Review: In the interim since his spectacular 1984 debut, "Bright Lights, Big City," Jay McInerney's follow-ups -- "Ransom" (1985), "Story Of My Life" (1988), "Brightness Falls" (1992) and "The Last Of The Savages" (1996) have all been good, but have failed to live up to what one of his characters might call "early promise." Not so with his latest, "Model Behavior," a stunning tour-de-force that delivers all the McInerney punch -- sizzling similes, masterful metaphors, dazzling descriptions and blistering satire -- in a remarkably slim volume. Critics may focus on the parallels with "BLBC," but McInerney offers readers a fresh story about frustrated-writer-spurned-by-vapid-model. For the '90s, the drug is not cocaine but Klonipin, the modern babylons not all-night discos but chic restaurants and book parties. McInerney also includes seven short stories in this collection, from the brilliant "Smoke," which chronicles the futile attempt of Russell and Corrine Callahan to quit smoking (a cutting room floor leftover from "Brightness Falls," whose protagonists were Russell and Corrinne Calloway?) and six other pieces, including a tense story about a prison doctor at the mercy of his patients.
Rating:
Summary: Worst Book Ever
Review: Many of the reviewers compare this to Bright Lights, Big City, but I only saw the movie. And this book, like the movie, was mediocore. There are indeed some hilarious and well observed moments--I won't dispute that McInerney is a talented word smith--and those are numerous (the thanksgiving dinner, the very last chapter, etc). But this book never quite feels like a story--more odd observations and bizarre plot twists. The email stalker? Why? The best satires also tell a good story, this one fails at times. As the old saying goes, There is no "there" there. As it attempts to prove how shallow the world is (was in the late 1990s), it is victim of its own shallowness. I was really disappointed. Several reviews here adore it, but not me. The author even attempts to mock himself the book. He attempts to make fun of literary critics who have trashed him--he metions himself in a review of the fictional Jeremy Green's book. It was supposed to be funny I guess, but it struck me as too much. The very last chapter had a style and wit about it, I just wish the rest of the book had that feel more often. In the end, it was just sort of blah--like the white t-shirt on the cover.
Rating:
Summary: There's no there there...
Review: Many of the reviewers compare this to Bright Lights, Big City, but I only saw the movie. And this book, like the movie, was mediocore. There are indeed some hilarious and well observed moments--I won't dispute that McInerney is a talented word smith--and those are numerous (the thanksgiving dinner, the very last chapter, etc). But this book never quite feels like a story--more odd observations and bizarre plot twists. The email stalker? Why? The best satires also tell a good story, this one fails at times. As the old saying goes, There is no "there" there. As it attempts to prove how shallow the world is (was in the late 1990s), it is victim of its own shallowness. I was really disappointed. Several reviews here adore it, but not me. The author even attempts to mock himself the book. He attempts to make fun of literary critics who have trashed him--he metions himself in a review of the fictional Jeremy Green's book. It was supposed to be funny I guess, but it struck me as too much. The very last chapter had a style and wit about it, I just wish the rest of the book had that feel more often. In the end, it was just sort of blah--like the white t-shirt on the cover.
Rating:
Summary: Celebrity World Rediscovered and Found Boring.
Review: McInerney is a celebrity signing his name to another book about the worn-out Manhattan world of tired young stars,celebrities and wannabees.This is not a book for entertaining readers.Its usefulness is in showing that the media-created world from the inside out is boring almost beyond bearing.These celebs eat,drink and have sex with other celebs in a tiny world created by event management and public relations.McInerney presents himself as another celebrity presenting the news from Manhattan's media world.Almost all the creatures he features have no shortage of money. Why are they at the top of the greasy pole? The writer never makes clear why people of such parochial dullness should be paid so much for so little .The style of the book is that of a Fellini-movie scenarist: an endless succession of people created by press releases,polished and satirized to the nth degree to show off the writer's wise-guy irony.We are told endlessly in the financial pages that the U.S. has never been so prosperous.So why is everyone bored to ther gills? Tom Wolfe presents Atlanta's moneyed population as burned-out con artists and silly oafs.Young McInerney shows Manhattan's media=created gang as expense account boors and jumped-up peasants.Not a pleasant picture of 1990s America.Don't bother.
Rating:
Summary: Subtile post-modernistic critique
Review: McInerney shows in 'Model Behaviour' that social criticisme needs not to be shouted out, but works best when it is brought with subtilty. More over this work of fiction is in my perspective the prove that postmodern fiction is still interesting to read. He uses bright methafores and some interesting meta-fiction that emphasis the dealings of this day and age. All in all a very good book.
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining, but author is cabable of much better
Review: McInerney was urged by others to publish Model Behavior and he should rethink their input on his career in the future. His Bright Lights, Big City, Ransom, and Brighness Falls were all brilliant books, but, like Story of My Life, Model Behavior is thin and superficial. Like Raymond Carver, Jay has a natural talent for brief scenes of humor, the type that make you burst out laughing while reading McInerney on a bus or wherever. Model Behavior has all that, and for fans of McInerney, it's a must have, if you don't mind rereading Bright Lights, Big City. Model Behavior is a snappy, more upbeat version of Bright Lights. It would be nice to see McInerney cover some new ground, but perhaps, he is doomed like author Bret Ellis and late '80s painter Basquiat to repeat the same images over and over. Maybe this is the plague of all '80s talent. Since writing about what you know is the key, all Jay needs to do is to learn something new, and soon, before Knopf publishers demands another book out of him.
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