The Narrator

Never identified by name, the narrator is the main character of this, his own, story. He shares many of the characteristics and background attributes of the writer, Jay McInerney. He is a young man, twenty-four years old, intelligent, physically average, who is the product of a typical upper-middle class, East Coast suburban upbringing and an elite, liberal arts education. We meet him in the throes of the breakup of his first marriage, suffering also from the shock of his mother's death and the seemingly impossible goal of ever becoming a fiction writer, which has always been his dream. He has fallen under the sway of a clubbing, cocaine snorting lifestyle and especially of a friend, Tad Allagash, who seems to embody this lifestyle. Therefore, he finds it difficult to hold onto his job at a prestigious Manhattan magazine, much less build an identity for himself independent of...