Jay McInerney's Reading List

"The House of Mirth doesn’t take place entirely in New York but it begins and ends there. Lily Bart, the heroine of The House of Mirth , was born on a higher rung of the social ladder than where she ends up. She is a compelling and tragic figure. The novel was very much concerned with the high society of the day, which was centred in New York – the famous 400 who fit in Mrs Astor’s ballroom. But even though it is concerned with a caste system that no longer exactly exists, The House of Mirth still resonates with readers. Americans are always fascinated with the wealthy. It’s a bit of an illusion to imagine ours to be a classless society, as novelists like Wharton made brilliantly clear."

"Catcher in the Rye injected a fresh idiom into American literature . This happened several times in our literary history. Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn and Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises did the same – they brought the contemporary spoken language into literature. When Salinger invented Holden Caulfield he gave his voice such freshness and vibrancy. Salinger also almost invented the concept of teenage angst – Salinger’s was the first voice of the youthquake that transformed our society in the 50s, 60s and 70s. That makes perfect sense to me, because it often seems that in Woody Allen’s movies he’s trying to preserve the New York of the immediate post-war years. Reading Catcher in the Rye made me want to live in New York City and go to the bars where Holden went and walk in his fictional steps through Central Park. For all of its satire, Catcher in the Rye is a very romantic portrait of New York."

"The Wicked Pavilion wonderfully reinforced my romantic notions of the bohemian life in Greenwich Village during the mid-20th century. Even while she satirises these writers, artists, models and hangers-on, Powell makes you want to be there, with them, at the Café Julien. I find it a very romantic vision of downtown. You mention the Odeon – that was a real gathering place for a tribe, akin to the one that Powell portrays, in the 80s. Of course there was Elaine’s, the ultimate literary hangout. Elaine’s was a place where writers and intellectuals were the stars, even more than actors and politicians. A few years ago, Waverly Inn was that kind of place. But I can’t think of any place that fills the bill at the moment, but maybe it’s just my age. Perhaps the Lion or Minetta Tavern. We come to the city to mingle and rub shoulders, not to stay in our apartments. If you’re going to just stay inside you might as well move to some place that is cheaper per square foot. We’re paying a premium for proximity to places outside our front door where we can find like-minded others, where we can find romantic partners, where we can preen, show off and watch other people do the same. That’s the point of New York – to see and be seen."

"It’s a brilliant satire of greed and the mindlessness of popular culture, of American life and of New York in the 80s. It’s a very thorough catalogue of the fixtures of urban existence in that era. This is the anti-romantic novel among my five books. It says that New Yorkers are so busy trying to get ahead that they don’t even notice when people are being killed next door. The killer in their midst, the main character, Patrick Bateman, is described by others as banal, boring. American Psycho was very controversial at the time because of its violence, but I think it’s a novel that justifies its violence. When I published Bright Lights, Big City in 1984, it didn’t seem that there was a New York novel. It had been a very long time since anyone had succeeded with writing about New York. David Epstein, my publisher, told me that although he liked my book he thought few people would be interested in New York as a literary subject. It had been quite a while since any book about the city had attracted a lot of attention. “We come to the city to mingle and rub shoulders, not to stay in our apartments – if you’re going to stay inside you might as well move to some place cheaper.” After Bright Lights, Big City , suddenly there were dozens of novels by young writers set in New York. I like to think I helped to revivify the New York novel and inject it with fresh aspects from the contemporary culture. My publisher also said to me that nightclubs and cocaine were hardly the material of literary fiction. At the time, the subject matter of Bright Lights, Big City was deemed to be beneath literature. But the book was popular and it spawned a lot of imitations."

"Lethem was one of the first people to write about the new Brooklyn. Like Catcher in the Rye , Fortress of Solitude was a beautiful coming-of-age novel infused with references to the popular culture of the day. A lot of the writers who come to New York now settle in Brooklyn as the result of economics. The prosperity of the 90s and the early part of this century might have been good for Manhattan in some ways but the boom meant that many of the most creative migrants to the city are settling in Brooklyn and even other boroughs. I’m sure that will affect the development of New York novels. It’s very hard to write about New York without reference to that event, which was the most dramatic event to occur in New York history since at least the Civil War Draft Riots in 1863, and maybe ever. Norman Mailer once said to me, “You should wait 10 years before you write about September 11.” I chose to ignore that advice, with The Good Life , because I wanted to capture the texture of the emotional response to that event, which is fading. But I’d like to think that someone out there, someone who did wait 10 years, is going to write a novel that addresses September 11 in some great way. Not as much as we thought it would. In the days after September 11, we used to hear that nothing would ever be the same again. We all briefly imagined that our lives would be transformed. Some people did change. They changed their jobs; they left their spouses. And then, of course, there were those who lost loved ones and were deeply affected forever. I do see some positive cultural change. I think New Yorkers are much more aware of their fellow citizens. When I first came to New York people wouldn’t make eye contact – they would literally step over bodies and they walked through the city with tunnel vision. Now people are more aware, more alert and more willing to play Good Samaritan. Now people are more likely to look at each other in subways and in elevators, partly because they’re wondering whether the person next to them would pull them from the rubble or maybe because they’re wondering if that person could be carrying a bottle of anthrax. But regardless of what prompts this interest in others, we’re all a little less self-involved."