Burning Down the House - Hardcover

McInerney, Jay's ex-wife, debuts with an entertaining, if slight, farce that's apparently intended-disclaimers aside-as a score-settling roman a clef. With humiliation as her leitmotif, she retells a story familiar from magazine features. A preppy, cocaine-addled would-be writer, named Blase Regenhere (pronounced "Blaze Ray-ner"), romances McInerney's narrator/alter ego, meek philosophy student Toby Dodge. Blase and Toby soon marry, but things begin to go wrong immediately-even at the disastrous, amusingly depicted wedding reception. Subsequently, Toby's academic career proves unreconcilable with her husband's lavish lifestyle, lampooned mercilessly here. Still, Toby works to provide Blase with moral support and remedial compositional training as he writes a confessional tale, A Dark Night of the Soul, about the wild side of New York yuppiedom. But once his novel catapults him to fame, Blase leaves Toby to return to the scene whose excesses he excoriated in the book. McInerney shows storytelling ability and a deft comic touch. Yet, while Toby's philosophizing occasionally intrigues, she finally appears to be not so much confused as unperceptive and lacking in perspective, while Blase, on whom the story focuses, seems less an enigma than a one-dimensional cad. With flat characterizations like these, McInerney's novel, for all its minor charms, doesn't display much more depth than the literary glitterati she's busy deflating.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Toby and Blase are the perfect couple for the 1990s. He is an aspiring novelist with leanings toward Fitzgerald, and she teaches philosophy while working on her Ph.D. Their courtship is passionate and romantic. Soon after they marry, Blase leaves his teaching job to write full-time, while Toby sportingly pays the bills. Then Blase's new novel hits the top of the charts, and their marriage hits the skids. Has success spoiled Blase? You bet! Their lives become a haze of parties, booze, and drugs, and Blase begins to sleep around. Toby is at the end of her rope when Blase walks out and she begins to pull her life together, sadder but wiser. One suspects that McInerney, the former wife of bad boy author Jay McInerney, knows quite well the territory about which she writes. Her all-too-familiar story is told with a sharp and stinging wit. Recommended for popular collections.
Susan Clifford, Huhges Aircraft Co., Los Angeles
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.