I didn’t care as much as I wanted to. Read this book if you’re looking for a one-night thing, a quickie reading that’s mainly for pleasure and the heck of it. If you’re looking for something serious, move on or read the part of this review under Sensuality vs Intellectualism. This novel offers so...
On the purchase of my flat last year, after renting 20 places in 18 years (including 6.5 years in one place), an ex-girlfriend gave me Jay McInerney's book, A Hedonist in the Cellar. She was overjoyed to find a book this bookman had not read, and one so appropriate to my newest passion in life, w...
Going into this review I had this funny little idea about 1991-2 being a year of growing up for the literary brat pack (a marketing and a journalistic invention that would be long forgotten if it weren't for the fact that we reviewers love it), I made a connection between McInerney, Ellis, Janowi...
McInerney, Jay. RANSOM. (1985) *****.tThis was the author’s second novel, and came out as a paperback original. It is the story of Chris Ransom, a young man who is trying to escape from his father in America and create a life for himself. He is in Japan, in Kyoto, studying karate, and interac...
In Jay McInerney's world, men are writers with varying degrees of success. They are married to women who are pregnant, which may or may not stall their philandering. The wife typically knows what's up and either ignores it, aborts the child or asks the man to have his fairly healthy cat put to sl...
In August, it became national news that there was a Jay McInerney novel that I had somehow overlooked. I thought I had McInerney covered — I even read his winefesto Hedonist in the Cellar for the love of God — and here was a novel-novel, probably set in New York City in the ’80s, probably filled ...
Kip asked as they sprawled on lawn chairs on the deck outside camp, looking out over the flats, silvery pink in the reflected sunset. Owl-eyed from a day on the water, white sunglass-shaped ovals on his sunburned face, he was wearing a multipocketed turquoise shirt and a Lehman Brothers cap. Afte...
A few months short of receiving my degree, I was in New York interviewing with law firms. She was assistant to a vice president at one of the big record companies. Still a recent immigrant to the North, Taleesha found it amusing—or perhaps she defensively pretended to be amused—to integrate such ...
It’s easier to say what it isn’t than what it is. I take Rivetti’s comment to mean that Barbera is not the kind of mellow international beverage you order by the glass at the bar of a revolving cocktail lounge while listening to a pianist cover Billy Joel. Certainly Rivetti’s Barberas, with their...
If the archetypal château owner of Bordeaux was a polished man of the world in English tweeds and Lobb shoes, the stereotypical Burgundian vigneron was a taciturn peasant in a beret and gum boots who hadn’t ranged any farther than his great-grandfather, who’d occupied the same house and land. Sey...
I duck behind a stone as the sound of the engine rises toward the gate and falls away among the streets of the town. Sitting on a flat marble slab, Tory continues cutting pieces of masking tape, which she attaches to the back of her hand. The cemetery grass is brown and worn, as if it has been gr...
The beer gardens on the rooftops of the big hotels reopened, and the air itself fell into lassitude; the kites flying over the river gradually disappeared, and with the burden of growing humidity, the sky seemed to lower itself on Kyoto like a canvas tent sagging with the weight of rainwater. The...