BOOKS: PICK OF THE WEEK

Jay McInerney Wed

Jongleurs, London NW1

Jay McInerney continues to live with unfeasibly high expectations. When his first novel, Bright Lights, Big City - a fast-paced, cocaine- packed jaunt around New York City - was published in 1984, he was hailed as a possible new F Scott Fitzgerald. And now? One sardonic critic recently backhandedly complimented McInerney on the fact that, while Fitzgerald wrote perhaps the second best novel of the century, Bright Lights was easily one of the 100 best books of the 1980s.

With his latest, Model Behaviour (Bloomsbury, pounds 6.99), from which he will read in Camden on Wednesday, McInerney has revisited the hip New York celebrity scene documented in that first success. And while this familiar retread - a magazine profile writer's girlfriend, a model, leaves him - is not the knockout punch to quieten the critics, it is a highly readable and competent work from a fine writer who knows his craft.

Jongleurs, Camden Lock, London NW1 (0171-292 5100) Wed, 7.30pm, pounds 5/pounds 2