Novel by Jay McInerney, 1984
Is this book an anachronism? The Amazon blurb said it was a sensation when it was first published in 1984. It’s about a young man, working as a fact checker at a New York publication very similar to to the New Yorker. He’s fairly unsympathetic. He’s one of those writers who never writes; he doesn’t take his job seriously (he gets fired during the novel); he has nothing but shallow relationships with others; he spends long nights getting hammered on booze and cocaine. He married a model, who left him not long before the book starts.
I have a feeling that many of these tropes were not as common in 1984 as they are now, but now it all feels like clichés.