Indian American writers have impacted our literary culture: Jay McInerney

JAIPUR - Acclaimed post-modern US novelist John Barrett “Jay” McInerney, a master of New York sagas, says writers of the Indian diaspora in his beloved city have made a significant impact on contemporary American literary culture.

“The Indian diaspora has become a part of the American and English literary tradition,” McInerney told IANS in an interview.

The 56-year-old blue eyed writer, a friend and neighbour of novelist Salman Rushdie, is known for his pathbreaking social reality novels set in New York, “Bright Lights, Big City”, “Ransom”, “Brightness Falls”, “Story of My Life”, “The Good Life” and the screenplay of the Paramount production, “Gia”. His books capture his racy sex, coke and gut culture of the changing US of the 1980s.

McInerney was labelled by the American media as the “literary brat pack” along with two fellow novelists Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz.

Their lives became the fodder for media gossip and literary opinion writing.

“I don’t know why I was waiting so long to come to India. I was on my way to India in 1979. I was in Japan but I was ill in Bangkok and they sent me home,” McInerney said, soaking in the rainbow shades of contemporary literature on show at the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival from Jan 21-25.

McInerney is writing a new novel that spans seven defining years of New York from 2003 to 2010.

“I am looking at the years of recession in my new book. The recession has made New Yorkers more reflective by necessity - people are a lot more afraid of what they have experienced,” he said.

For McInerney, who pioneered the boom in creative writing in New York during the 1980s after a gap of three decades since the 1950s, when New York had ceased to become a literary subject, the recession is a cycle.

“When I came to New York in the very end of 1979, the city had a break. It was bankrupt and suffered the great heroin epidemic,” he said.

“There was a great deal of crime. But it was also a place where young people could live in islands of prosperity. Right now, I see stores that are closing and more homeless people are on the streets. Homelessness was very visible in New York when I came first. The new wave of dispossessed people made an appearance nearly three years ago. However, the New York of the 80s seems quite quaint when compared to what happened on Wall Street a few years ago,” the writer said.

McInerney, who was mentored by Raymond Carver and Norman Mailer, worked with the New Yorker before he published his first novel, “Big City, Bright Lights” in 1984.

“I worked as a facts-checker but I did not like my job because I was not good with facts. I always wanted to write a fiction,” the novelist recalled.

“A New York editor once said the best stories started in the worst experiences,” McInerney said.

In Jay McInerney’s case, it began with his mother’s death in 1983. “Soon after, I was fired from New Yorker and my first wife left me in a week. But New York remained the great focus of my aspiration. I was inspired and excited by the city around the time for New York was in a state of flux,” he said.

The year 1983 was also the “last moment of innocence in the writer’s life before he changed his notions about sexuality with cocaine becoming a metaphor of culture”.

McInerney hit the headlines with the success of his first book the following year in 1984.

Recalling his association with iconic American writer Norman Mailer, McInerney said, “I remained Mailer’s friend till his death. His wife died a few months ago of cancer,” McInerney said.

The writer is celebrating the survival of the novel. “Writer Tom Wolfe once said that journalism is going to replace the novel. But the novel has reinvented itself and the novel isn’t dead yet,” he said.

McInerney is a connoisseur of fine wines thanks to two of his wine columns.

He says “the Indian wine industry is opening up”.

“Ten years ago, there was no Sula. Wine drinking is civilising. But Indians should lobby to lower the tariffs of wine from other countries. They pay so much more for their wine,” McInerney said.

The author is fond of red wine from Burgundy. “I start with red and then move on to the white wine,” he said.