Burning Down the House

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. (Sept.)