The mixture of financial types, publishing people, drink-cadging bloggers, and assorted hangers-on made for the kind of spectacle that, could they ever have conceived of it, would have made the Pilgrims decide that any kind of torture and oppression was better to endure than sailing to an unknown continent to lay the groundwork for a country that would, on some chilly evening in the early spring of one of the nation's most prosperous decades, put forth a party like this one. You hated loving hating to love being there, and you struggled to conceal yourself, and before you knew it you were being introduced to Jay McInerney and telling him that, yes, you were the one who called him "Douchebag, Jay Douchebag" on your silly little website, an admission he took with the calm demeanor of someone used to having complete strangers let him know that they had referred to him as a douchebag each time he made a new acquaintance. Which is to say he smiled, nodded, and then told a story about himself that, while amusing, did nothing to disprove the earlier judgment. Still, he was perfectly friendly, and was soon posing for pictures with young Vachon, who was outfitted in the standard blazer and underbuttoned shirt that seem to mark so many young men who have come into a great fortune via inheritance, the financial markets, or gigantic book deals. This was his room, this was his time, and everyone around him moved about with the constant awareness that they were in the presence of the season's Next Big Thing. He outshone the combined wattage of the thousand Next Little Things who scurried about the packed event trying to grab the oversized appetizers that were being passed around by harried buspeople.

Looking around you were overwhelmed by the stunning mediocrity of most of it. Did you see Nick Denton in the back, standing close—but not too close—to his former employee (and Mergers dedicatee) Elizabeth Spiers? Was that Radar resurrectionist Maer Roshan leaning back and carrying low in a conversation with a reporter from WWD? Who would win the battle of drunken WASP stereotypes with the surname Morgan, Hudson or Spencer? Could the News' Ben Widdicombe get in enough free wines before Cocktail's Jo Piazza finished the last bottle? Why weren't we informed that no one wears ties anymore? It's a sad day when publishing types are dressed better than the finance types, but it's even sadder when the bloggers are sporting neckwear.

There was a stunned moment of shocked ecstasy when, by the wall where Roshan deputy Chris Tennant was disgruntledly flirting, a full set of breasts came into view, their sparkly flesh somehow offering to extend and make good the promise of sex. Then, just as quickly you realized it was Julia Allison, and tried to think of puppies and babies, anything good and pure. It shouldn't have been a surprise to see her—she's everywhere, like ejaculate on a porn booth floor—but it seemed like as good a time as any to surf the crowd and find someone willing to offer a quote. I passed by Radar whatever Neel Shah, but I didn't need any advice on dating or taxicab etiquette or blogging for Glamour, so I moved on. Spotting literary agent David Kuhn, I introduced myself and told him I worked for Gawker, which was probably not a good idea.

"So David," I asked, "how do you feel about being Out magazine's fiftieth most powerful gay?"

"Is this for print?"

"Fuck yeah."

"Then just say I'm happy I wasn't the fifty-first." He then went on to say something extremely funny and extremely off the record about Out's Aaron Hicklin and, perhaps realizing that the last thing you want to do around an inebriated gossip blogger is start being candid, asked "Hey, do you want to meet the real Roger Thorne?"

Thorne is the "id" character of Mergers, an entitled, foul-mouthed, nip-slip-obsessed caricature of every Ivy League WASP who has done well in life due to family connections rather than any semblance of intelligence. How could I not want to meet the model? Kuhn, desperate to get rid of me lest he say something catty about Tina Brown, was happy to make the introductions and disappear.

"Dude, I love Gawker!" said the Thorne inspiration.

"Dude, I loved your character! How does it feel to be the model for Roger Thorne?"

"Dude, it's awesome! I mean, some of that stuff was exaggerated, but you know—" He suddenly grew wistful and displayed the kind of reticence with which the banker in the book was entirely unfamiliar. "I'd prefer that this isn't on Gawker. You know, I just want to have a good time."

I was started to feel that second stage of inebriation, the one where you know you have a good hour, if that, of comprehensibility left, so I nodded and shook his firm American hand and went out into the cool air to clear my head and fill my lungs with smoke. My head hurt from overindulgence in the drinks department and underindulgence on the solid side—we expect too much of alcohol and too little of hors d' uvre—but as I worked my way toward the door I swore I saw the only two women who work for Radar.

Outside was no better than in, except you could smoke and you were less likely to run into Nick Denton, who will pick random moments at parties to discuss the unnecessary technical changes he's forcing on your website and mutter ominously about post counts and generally just scare the shit out of you that you're going to be fired within the week. Managing Editor Choire Sicha was smoking—Managing Editor Choire Sicha is always smoking—and discussing the merits of Remnick v. Brown with Roshan, a longtime Brown partisan. Somewhere in the background I could hear the Canadian-accented tones of the Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar and her posse of Eat the Pressers. Balthazar habitu Lockhart Steele was chatting with New York Sun contributor Meghan Keane. Dealbreaker's John Carney hobbled about on one crutch. It occurred to me that these were the same fucking people I saw at work or in bars every day. I checked in with the people from Riverhead, who lamented the absence of Emily Gould since it left them unable to thank her for keeping the book so prominent in the cultural conversation.

Vachon approached once more. He was in excellent spirits, effusive with praise, modest in his own success, proud to point out the fine family members who had come to town for the celebration. Vachon told me how much my support for the novel meant to him, how my assessment of its flaws mirrored his own. He told me all this and my hand grew tighter around my drink. I stared at Dana blankly as I realized that having to write this report as an inconsistent dispatch in the style of his novel was going to be painful and time-consuming for me and anyone who had to read it. Then I felt warm liquid on my hand and looked at my tie and first noticed the thin trail of dark red that trickled down my jacket. I was spilling wine on myself and it became clear to everyone how drunk I was. It wasn't until I put the glass down and saw how the wine had pooled on my jeans and dripped down to my shoes, and how it came now more quickly, through my fingers, that, in the space of a final epiphany, I finally understood it all. I really need to switch to white; it stains less. —balk

Rhymes With Memily: Let's start with one of my biggest complaints about the book: It fell apart at the end. Agree/disagree?
BALK BTW: Well, overall I really enjoyed the book. I thought the entire Mexico segment was unfortunate and partially juvenile, and I thought the girlfriend character was a piece of cardboard that should have had the words "symbolizes virtue and purity" written on it. And I think that's the ultimate flaw in the ending. I love the way he builds up to that anecdote and the writing in it is pitch perfect, but if you don't care about the girlfriend, the whole thing is somewhat empty.
Rhymes With Memily: Uh oh, I pretty much agree with you. [Ed. Note: Oh good, then this is over!]
Rhymes With Memily: I mean, except the "writing pitch perfect" part, I do think his voice is just good, that he's a natural, but the problem with being a natural is that it's really easy to get lazy, sloppy.
Rhymes With Memily: But yeah, the girlfriend was my biggest problem with the whole book.
Rhymes With Memily: Let me ask you a question? Do you think he's being sincere or parodic when he describes their first, uh, sexual encounter
Rhymes With Memily: ("bout of lovemaking?")
Rhymes With Memily: and he describes her breasts as "perfect 34Bs"
Rhymes With Memily: Do you think he thinks that's a legitimate way to speak, or is he purposely making the character a dumb frat boy?
BALK BTW: Oh, I read that in exactly the opposite way. I think that's Dana trying to convey the innocence of the character (who I want to keep referring to as Nick Carraway), suggesting that amidst these over-the-top monsters he's a guy who hasn't yet fallen into that trap but might.
BALK BTW: I think the "bout of love making" and 34bs are supposed to be the counterpoint to the Thorne character's "he tagged my sister," and other vulgarities.
Rhymes With Memily: But 34bs are... not the opposite of that kind of Maximspeak.
Rhymes With Memily: They're... the same thing.
BALK BTW: I read it as not being "look at these knockers!" But I don't read Maxim, you may be right.
Rhymes With Memily: I mean, ultimately the narrator — we can call him Nick, it's better than "Dana," I guess — IS a lot like roger thorne
BALK BTW: Well, I think part of the book — and part of Gatsby, if you think about it — is that we all have those elements in us, even though we think better of ourselves. We're just unaware of it when surrounded by such cartoony examples of it, until, little by little, we develop into it or have the big epiphany that makes us go the other way.
Rhymes With Memily: False epiphany.
Rhymes With Memily: Did you read Indecision? It has a similar "and then i escaped this false world after discovering how false it was" easy ending
BALK BTW: I did not read Indecision.
BALK BTW: But I also don't know that the Nick character DOES escape that world.
Rhymes With Memily: right, because it's AMBIGUOUS
Rhymes With Memily: aka LAZY
BALK BTW: I mean, if there were a next chapter he'd be broken up with the girlfriend, or she would have killed herself, and he'd be thinking about his feelings on some beach in Thailand with a bunch of hookers and some other guys from the office.
Rhymes With Memily: Back to the girlfriend
Rhymes With Memily: So much BLOOD all the time
BALK BTW: Because she is pure.
Rhymes With Memily: like, all this lady can do is bleed
Rhymes With Memily: and call things "horribly beautiful" or something
BALK BTW: She suffers for the sins of the world.
Rhymes With Memily: Ha, her stigmata
Rhymes With Memily: Why do we care about his pampered rich girl's suffering?
Rhymes With Memily: Also, WHY does she suffer so?
Rhymes With Memily: i kept expecting to find out the dark secret
Rhymes With Memily: but ... uh, so not dark
BALK BTW: [We're not going to reveal the dark secret. Suffice it to say that RWM finds it extremely disappointing and BALK BTW sees it as symbolic. Which is actually the crux of the argument, if you want to stop reading now. - Ed.]
Rhymes With Memily: There is one BIG thing I want to say about the book
Rhymes With Memily: You know Dana. Do you think he knows that another New York City exists underneath the one he depicts? Or is he just as clueless about that as his characters are?
Rhymes With Memily: Is it a book by rich people for rich people?
BALK BTW: Oh, he totally knows another New York exists. I could actually see an argument that it's a book by rich people for poor people. Like, sure, you imagine it's like this, but it's actually WORSE.
BALK BTW: I think the book has a lot of the same contradictions Dana does, about wealth and society, etc. It all comes down to Catholicism, actually. He's a Westchester Graham Greene.
Rhymes With Memily: Hmmm, maybe that's what all the blood is about!
BALK BTW: Oh, sure.
Rhymes With Memily: I disagree that it's a cautionary "see, mo money mo problems" kind of tale.
Rhymes With Memily: Maybe i'm projecting?
Rhymes With Memily: But the feeling i got from it is, "You can never be a part of this world, which, yes, has some negative aspects, but also involves a lot of fun and creature comforts."
BALK BTW: Wow, I read it from the total opposite perspective. "Look how horrid this world is, but look how ultimately seductive it is. Only the pure can resist."
BALK BTW: Again, Catholicism.
Rhymes With Memily: Well, it's a very superficial kind of purity.
BALK BTW: It's a superficial age.
Rhymes With Memily: It's a superficial book.
BALK BTW: I don't know about that. It's a book about a superficial subject, to be sure. I'm not saying it's Gatsby, but I'm not saying it's crap either. It's definitely not airport fiction.
Rhymes With Memily: I think it's something far worse, actually.
Rhymes With Memily: At least airport fiction doesn't pretend to be anything it's not.
Rhymes With Memily: It's like the fast food equivalent of a real novel about these kinds of characters.
Rhymes With Memily: It's prettily packaged, and the author has a great backstory that's a natural publicity hook, and clearly a lot of the publisher's resources went into the marketing campaign. But don't let that deceive you into thinking that this is actually an important book.
Rhymes With Memily: It's an amusing book, and a good effort for a debut! A really good effort.
BALK BTW: I don't know that anyone's claiming it's going to be taught in English Lit classes a hundred years from now. But neither is Bonfire of the Vanities or other New York decadence books that come out every ten years or so. I think you're at issue with the hype, the advance, the packaging, etc. Your argument seems more with the industry than it is with the book itself, which is, yes, flawed, but not so flawed that it doesn't deserve to be published or read.
Rhymes With Memily: I'm not at all saying that it doesn't deserve to be published or read, and I didn't think you were saying that it will be taught in English Lit classes. I agree with you that it will maybe be taught by American Studies profs the same way Bonfire or other "New York decadence" books might be because of the way it captures a specific cultural moment. You're right, I do have a problem with Next Big Thingness in general. But that aside, there are expectations one has of any published novel. Six more months, even, might have helped Dana not make the ending so slapdash and hollow. Six more years might have helped Dana not make the girlfriend so cardboardy. I wish he'd opted to take one or the other or both rather than following the "David Kuhn likes my blog, okay, I guess I'm ready to be a novelist now!" path.
BALK BTW: Well, I don't think we live in that world anymore. I think he's a talented writer who will only get better as he writes more, but the way things work now, you take the money and you learn to write in public. I almost think six more years would have produced a worse book, because it's so about the immediacy of this moment. And I think workshopping his voice would destroy what's special about it. It's probably unfortunate that everyone is rushed to get their debuts out, but I don't know what the alternative is. I think by the third book he's gonna be REALLY REALLY good. But I don't know how you don't take the money and write. It's almost meta in that the same way he's being hyped and published says a lot about the splashiness and gaudiness that are the center of the novel.
BALK BTW: But a lot of my anger about things comes from - honestly - an idealism that things should be better. I think, in this case, that's where you're coming from. [Ed. Note: Not to be sexist, but when did Balk turn into a woman?]
Rhymes With Memily: I guess we're getting to the same place but just via different routes.
Rhymes With Memily: You make a really good point about taking the money and learning to write in public. [Ed Note: Jesus Lord, you guys.]
Rhymes With Memily: And you're also right about the irony of how he's being hyped, and the novel being sort of about that. It'll make writing about the party fun!
Rhymes With Memily: Or maybe the reverse! Ok well. you haven't managed to convince me that I liked the book, but you did manage to convince me that your friend wasn't EVIL to foist it on the world in its parbaked state.
BALK BTW: Baby steps, Mem. Baby steps.

Thanks this week to our advertisers: 24 Hour Fitness, American Apparel, Canon, Crunch Fitness, Sony Pictures Black Book, Fairchild Publications, Mergers & Acquisitions, Nokia, Perfect Stranger, SV Supreme Vodka, Sprint, UWISHUNU.com, VW, and Verizon.

We have no fucking clue what the ad sales team is doing. They don't tell us anything, ever, which is the right thing to do but can also make for some uncomfortable situations when something we've been mocking (or, in rare cases, praising) winds up on the side of the page next to the item. (This isn't uncommon elsewhere, of course—but you know, we think we're just so different. Oh, look, we aren't!)

Here's the dirty little non-secret about Gawker: Nobody knows what anyone else is doing. We sit here manically refreshing our browsers looking for something—anything—to write about that will help you make it through your workday and help us meet our post quota. Somewhere around us, idiots are blogging about cars or video games or some horrible thing like that. As happy as we would be to have some involvement with the business side of things, it is just not the case. Actually, we really wouldn't. For one thing, Gawker Ad Guy Chris Batty is so dismissive of the editorial team that he refers to us collectively as "Meat" (he refers to Choire as "meat manager"). He's actually kind of a dick.

So, duh. If you see Gawker obsess over a topic like Vachon, it's because a specific editor has a bizarre obsession with/personal friendship with/abiding hatred for the subject. Any advertising overlap is not only coincidental, it makes us all feel a little dirty. And you know what we do for a living: Imagine how dirty we feel already.

If you've got further questions we are happy to answer them. Or you can bring it up with the Ombudsman. —balk

Hud's becoming more like his former employer Lloyd Grove every day, noted another attendee, meaning drink-enjoying. We don't necessarily agree—though of course cautionary tales lurk around each of us. We should know!

So he and Julia Allison start having dirty chat about blowjobs and bruising. This was not the sort of high-quality intellectual debate observers expected from the Huffington scene. (They were hoping to find Elayne Boosler telling stories about cute animals!) But! Bruising? Really, Julia?

Upon investigation, Ms. Allison was indeed sporting a bruise on her left arm, roundabouts the bicep. Apparently her current boytoy, Men's Health editor Dave Zinczenko, fancies himself something of a wrestler. Ms. Allison wouldn't comment, for once in her life. (Good for her.) But we're concerned. Rose McGowan would never have put up with this sort of thing. —choire

In Fine Print [NYT]

Thing is, reading M&A probably is a lot like fucking Dana Vachon, or at least, a lot like postcoitally cuddling with him while he bares his soul and discusses the hardship of being a rich person who isn't like the other rich people. It's rare to get a peek into the inner workings of that kind of boy's brain! Maybe reading the book is less like fucking Vachon, actually, and more like what having an actual relationship with him might be like: fast-paced and exciting and even a little bit funny at first, if a little emotionally hollow. And then, as the experience wears on and Vachon palpably puts in less and less effort, the thing becomes increasingly hollow, decreasingly exciting.

This reader kept thinking that five or six more years of actual life experience would have enriched the book considerably, potentially transforming the easy caricatures into insightful portraits. But no one gets that kind of time nowadays; if Vachon had holed up somewhere to hone his craft, we'd be talking about some other fresh-faced, Catholic-nosed specimen's McInerney-anointed debut right now. So the question becomes: why does this uniform take on what it's like to be young, male, and privileged in New York City merit so much retelling?

Maybe it's because the ease with which it can be taken down makes it a publicist's dream. Lizzy Ratner and I fuel the hype machine in the same predictable way, just as sympathizers and enthusiasts like McInerney and Balk fan the flames. There's no winning with this next big thing, flavor of the month shit. We'll all just keep playing our roles and nothing will ever change except for the specifics. It's a dysfunctional relationship, all right, one that leaves us feeling dirty and vowing never to get involved with this kind of guy again, even though we know that we'll probably be a sucker for the next one who comes along. —emily

Earlier: Dana Vachon Backlash Begins In Gritty, Blue-Collar Paper
Breakfast At Balthazar [NYO]