Model behavior

by Jay McInerney

In Model Behavior, Connor McKnight - former acolyte of film, Zen and Japanese literature - is not unaware that these avocations are wildly remote from his present occupation (fledgling celebrity journalist). Moreover, his longtime girlfriend, the fashion model Philomena, suddenly seems curiously remote herself - and soon enough appears to have decamped, avec diaphragm, for the other coast. Then there's the sister with whom he shared a flamboyantly addled childhood, and who now matches her brilliance for theoretical abstraction with a compassion for world suffering so acute that her own well-being is imperiled. So now, as Thanksgiving and Christmas bear down upon him, not to mention a female admirer who's stalking him by e-mail, Connor gropes his hapless, hilarious way toward not so much salvation as self-preservation, favoring the right things as he is relentlessly pursued by all the wrong, bad, ill-advised or plain unlucky. Model Behavior is McInerney at full tilt - while the seven st