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You know Jay McInerney, and the man seated before you is not the Jay McInerney you know.

Everything else about this scene is as you expected. This place he asked to meet you seems like the sort of place Jay McInerney might ask to meet someone: the stylish lobby bar of a W Hotel, where 3 p.m. is evidently a perfectly appropriate time to play Arcade Fire at a volume your mother would consider abusive. A stout Asian man in his 50s floats by with a tray full of candles. An attractive brunette in a short skirt and knee-high boots nuzzling her bare legs settles into a comfortable leather chair a few feet away and begins cooing into her Bluetooth.

Wait, stop looking at her; she is not your assignment. Focus on the man in front of you, this possibly faux McInerney, who is talking about his muscular new collection of short stories, How It Ended . You've never met Jay McInerney. You know him from his fiction and, more than that, from the tabloid accounts of his life over the last 25 years, chronicling his clubbing, his modelizing, his many wives (since late 2006 with No. 4: a Hearst heiress, no less).

You'd expected someone nattily attired, an icon of New York nightlife and literary celebrity who might whip out some coke and casually persuade that brunette to recline and allow the two of you to do a few lines off her toned, naked midsection.

But the man in front of you looks merely like a 54-year-old working writer, which is to say, unshaven and a little jowly and a tad pallid, and you can't help but notice he's only your height, and you're not that tall, and what good is a God who cannot tower over you?

But then, you remind yourself, people have been mixing up McInerney and his fiction ever since his first novel came out in 1984, Bright Lights, Big City , which followed a disaffected twentysomething New Yorker trying to recover his equilibrium after the death of his mother from cancer, being dumped by his wife and losing his magazine fact-checking job: all of which had happened to the author.

That merging of fact and fiction continues with a pair of new stories in How It Ended . In one, The Madonna of Turkey Season , a writer suffers family criticism for penning a film script based in part on his own family's tragedies, including the death of his mother.

McInerney tells you that it has been a drag competing with his public persona and having some of the critics aim at his behaviour rather than appraise the work.

“In retrospect, if I'd known how big a monster I was creating, I would have really reconsidered my behaviour, but it was hard to see,” he tells you.

Still, he says, when Bright Lights came out, there was a sense in the publishing community that fiction was dead. “There wasn't any reason to think, as a novelist, that if you waved your arms and took your shirt off, that anybody was gonna notice. So when people did begin to notice, it all seemed like good fun and a way of calling attention to the fiction. It became much more than that, obviously, and it was a long time, foolishly, before I realized that the personal, the celebrity, could overshadow the work.”

You suggest to him that literary critics are, by and large, a nerdy and envious lot, and that when he opened Bright Lights, Big City with the protagonist's second-person late-night observation, made in a downtown club filled with cheap coke and swaying bodies and thunking music, “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning,” they believed he was one of them, that he was disparaging that glamorous way of life. And then he went on to embody it.

“That's an interesting observation,” he tells you. “I guess I always felt like I was kinda' touring, and my pass was gonna be taken away at any moment. I always thought, Well, it's really interesting meeting movie stars, rock stars and stuff, but any moment now they're gonna tell me I have to go back to my studio on the Bowery.”

Is McInerney ill at ease? You watch him as he sits back hard, placing his ass at the back of the chair, throwing his right leg over his left knee and grabbing his boot. He holds that pose for about 10 seconds to say something, then drops his right foot to the floor. After a few moments more, he extends his body long in the chair and clasps his hands together on top of his head, holding that for a few seconds in a pose of affected comfort, then returns once more to the upright position. It occurs to you that a fast-forward film of McInerney would make him seem like a human piston.

“I have to say,” he continues, “the writers that were my role models led very interesting, colourful lives, like Hemingway, Fitzgerald. They weren't shrinking violets. And maybe I was a nerd but didn't want to be one, you know? I thought, like, I wanted, possibly even through the act of writing, to transform myself into somebody who was more of an alpha male. I wanted to do the literary equivalent of bulking myself up.”

You tell him that you hope he winds up happier than either Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald.

“Yeah, Fitzgerald ceases to be a viable role model for anybody after they turn 40, because he was a disaster by the age of 35. And I gave a lot of thought a number of years ago to how I was gonna somehow make a second act for myself, and not become either a joke or roadkill or a suicide. It wasn't clear to me for a while. And I went through a terrible period of writer's block, depression.” This was in 1999 and 2000.

“Part of it was chemical, part of it had to do with the fact that I couldn't keep writing about disaffected post-adolescents, but I hadn't quite figured out a new way of thinking about myself, and a new narrative stance. So I had a sort of 3 a.m. night-of-the-soul there for a year or so, but I like to think I got out of it, and I like to think, you know, with my last novel I started the grown-up part of my literary career.”

You remember that last novel, The Good Life (2006), a post-Sept. 11 story that brought back Corrine and Russell Calloway, the protagonists of his 1992 morality tale about the excesses of the late 1980s, Brightness Falls . How It Ended treats readers to the very first appearance of the Calloways, in the 1985 short story Smoke .

Those two novels are his favourites, he says, adding that he doesn't think he's finished with Corrine and Russell. “They're sort of my alter egos,” he explains with a chuckle. “If I hadn't become a novelist, I would have tried to become an editor, and then I might be Russell Calloway. If I'd stayed married to my college sweetheart. That is my version of my normal life. The life I didn't end up leading.”

McInerney began writing a new book last July: his novel of the recession, he says with a small laugh. “It just happened to be about a guy who'd had it all and lost it all and fled New York for the east end of Long Island.” (You recall now that McInerney lives in Greenwich Village and spends weekends in Bridgehampton, where his wife Anne Hearst was living when they met. His twin children, a 14-year-old boy and girl, live with their mother, his third wife, not far away.)

But if that book is set largely outside Manhattan, he keeps a close eye on the city, even hitting the clubs every couple of months. “I don't want to be writing about what it's like to sit out on Long Island and count the deer on my lawn,” he quips. “I always want to have a sort of panorama of New York in my head.

“I think of the city as my subject, and I don't want to become trapped in some small corner of it just by circumstance, you know? Just because I'm older, just because I'm married, I don't want to lose my curiosity about the city.”

On occasion, he has been spotted at clubs with the comely young cast of the Upper East Side teen drama Gossip Girl , on which McInerney had a cameo playing himself. You ask him about the report in Variety last month that the show's creator, Josh Schwartz, had obtained the rights to remake Bright Lights, Big City .

“I don't think we got it right the first time [the 1988 movie starring Michael J. Fox],” he explains. “Originally Josh was dead set on doing it in period. But he e-mailed me a couple of weeks ago and said, You know, I just re-read the book, there's really nothing in it that couldn't be brought up to the present. He said, imagine Tad Allagash [the protagonist's fast-talking friend] working for Lehman Brothers in 2007. That seems to me to be kind of cool.”

You say, wait: What about the coke? Wouldn't it seem awfully eighties? “There's coke out there,” he replies, a half beat faster than you'd expect. “I mean, you don't think all those people are in all those nightclubs till 4:30 a.m. under their own steam, do you?”

You tell him you don't get out as much as you used to. “There's tons of coke,” he says. A grin creeps across his face, a Cheshire cat smile, really. Ah, there you are: That's the Jay McInerney you know.