How It Ended
“How It Ended reminds us how impressively broad McInerney’s scope has been and how confidently he has ranged across wide swaths of our national experience…McInerney’s contribution—and it is a major one—is to have revitalized the Irish Catholic expiatory tradition of F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O’Hara…McInerney’s gifts have never been in question. He possesses the literary naturalist’s full tool kit: empathy and curiosity, a peeled eye and a well-tuned ear, a talent for building narratives at once intimate and expansive, plausible and inventive.”
New York Times Book Review (front page)
From the writer whose first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, defined a generation comes a collection of stories drawn from his nearly three-decade career. Whether set in New England, Los Angeles, New York, or the South, they unveil the manic flux of our society as they capture various stages of adulthood: a young man confronting the class system at a summer resort; a young woman holed up in a remote cabin while her boyfriend campaigns for the highest office; a couple whose experiments in sexuality cross every line; a doctor who treats convicts and is coming to terms with his own criminal past; a youthful socialite returning home to nurse her mother; a family celebrating the holidays while mired in loss; and more.
A manifold exploration of delusion, experience, and transformation, these stories display a preeminent writer at the very top of his form.
Praise