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Books: A Man of His Time

The Zeitgeist is all in how you look at it. So for Jay McInerney, who spends his time canoodling at New York City parties, cavorting in the Hamptons and consuming media, it's all about models. And sure, models are big, no doubt. But McInerney is looking at the '90s through an '80s lens. Reading him is like listening to a ham-radio operator explain e-mail.

The title novella in McInerney's new book, Model Behavior (Knopf; 275 pages; $24), does make some good jokes about our increasing desire to kowtow to celebrities. Having interviewed a slew of them for magazines, and having been...

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RAY KELLY, New York City Police Commissioner, on the arrest of a New Jersey man in one of the nation's most baffling missing-children cases, the disappearance more than three decades ago of 6-year-old Etan Patz.
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