THE new compilation of short fiction by Jay McInerney, "How It Ended: New and Collected Stories," assembles much that he has written over the course of a career now approaching three decades.

The better part of "Model Behavior: A Novel and Stories" is included, along with the story that grew into his Salingerian first novel, "Bright Lights, Big City," as well as "Smoke," which introduced Russell and Corrine Calloway, the Manhattan couple-with-everything whose marital vicissitudes animate McInerney's two most ambitious novels, "Brightness Falls" and its sequel "The Good Life."

Short stories "often turned out to be warm-up exercises," McInerney confides in a preface. "There's psychological as well as practical value in using one as a sketch for a novel; the idea of undertaking a narrative of three or four hundred pages, which might consume years of your life, is pretty daunting."

As it unfolds a synoptic map of McInerney's literary progress from the 1980s (downtown clubs, New Wave music, cocaine) to the 2000s (Upper East Side lairs, "The Sopranos," pastoral detox spas), "How It Ended" implicitly proposes an apologia pro vita sua of an author often tagged as a kind of Lizard Lounge act, his repertoire limited to reports on Manhattan hedonism - particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, when for the entitled few the borough was a den of iniquitous pleasures and McInerney himself a bleary-eyed magnet for tabloid photojournalists and eavesdropping waiters doubling as anonymous tipsters.

In fact, McInerney has been throughout a productive artist - this is his 10th book and his eighth work of fiction - and also a diligent one, who has steadily refined his craft and rigorously deepened his subjects and themes.

"How It Ended" reminds us how impressively broad McInerney's scope has been. It reminds us that for all the many literary influences he has absorbed, McInerney's contribution - and it is a major one - is to have revitalized the Irish Catholic expiatory tradition of F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O'Hara, with its emphasis not only on guilt but also on shame: on sins committed and never quite expunged, always in open view of the sorrowing punitive clan.

Even the most alienated characters in McInerney's universe remain tethered, or chained, to others.

He is preoccupied with the many varieties of the strangling embrace, whether felt by star-struck political hirelings reduced to pimping for a philandering senator ("My Public Service"), Irish-American brothers locked in competitive mother-love ("The Madonna of Turkey Season") or a Bible Belt couple whose sexual dysfunction degrades them into sick rituals of voyeurism ("Invisible Fences").

In "Con Doctor," a drug-addicted physician, Kevin McClarty, exiled from Chicago to a generic southeastern city and still wobbly after rehab, penitently administers to inmates in a high-security prison, and at night repairs to the walled-in "community" where he cohabits with a local clothier, herself a recovering alcoholic, brassy and voluptuous. "She looked like someone who would be dating a pro athlete, or a guy with a new Ferrari who owned a chain of fitness centers," McInerney writes. In bed with her, McClarty "feels simultaneously that he is slumming and sleeping above his economic station." The wit is mordant, the language honed, the status calibration elegantly exact - and it all enriches the fatalistic mood.

McInerney's gifts have never been in question. He possesses the literary naturalist's full tool kit: empathy and curiosity, a peeled eye and a well-tuned ear, a talent for building narratives at once intimate and expansive, plausible and inventive.

His sentences, vivid but unshowy, exhibit the same strengths he once identified in Fitzgerald's; they are "sophisticated without being superior, conspiratorial without the gossip's malice."

All this was present from the outset, as was McInerney's romantic attraction to soured glamor. The oldest entry in the new collection, "In the North-West Frontier Province," eerily predicts our current post-terrorist age. It is a glimpse of hell, set in the parched hilly borderlands in central Asia where a global menage of young dead-enders have converged in search of drugs and thrills.

"Pathan tribesmen with Enfield rifles strapped over their shoulders and bandoliers of ammunition wrapped around their baggy shirts" patrol the local bazaar and menacingly enforce "the code of tribal honor, blood relation and vendetta" even as they broker heroin sales and calculate their odds of exploiting strung-out Western women.

One evening the American protagonist dines with an Australian primed for fresh adventure after two years in Outback opal mines. "He had a dry, brick-red tan against which his green eyes and the gaudy opal pendant on his chest glistened. Over kebabs he told Trey, who hadn't asked, that he was in Landi Kotal to score hash oil. He was going to swallow it in condoms," and then excrete the drug back in Sydney.

"Trey felt obliged to tell him that it was an old trick and that people had died in the bargain; any residual alcohol that hadn't been boiled off in the processing of the oil would eat through the condoms, and once that happened it was permanent deep space."

The story was written at Syracuse University, where McInerney, after being fired from The New Yorker's fact-checking department, had enrolled in fiction workshops, his teachers Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff, both masters of compressed narrative. McInerney submitted "In the North-West Frontier Province" to The Paris Review, at the time a generously wide gateway for young fiction writers.

The editor, George Plimpton, liked it - not enough to publish but enough to phone the author and ask for something else.

McInerney promptly extruded, in a single all-night session, he says, "It's Six AM Do You Know Where You Are?" an evocation of the downtown Manhattan club scene, later expanded into the novel "Bright Lights, Big City" (1984), which deservedly made its 29-year-old author famous: the wounded, smart-aleck wit, the imagistic depiction of 1980s Manhattan, in transition from "Taxi Driver" dilapidation to "Wall Street" opulence.

Once again McInerney created a picture of hell - actually two alternating hells, held in clever counterpoise, one the staid, venerable magazine where the unnamed 24-year-old protagonist distractedly labors in a continual panic of low-paid drudgery, the other the night-town of bars and clubs where he seeks escape, the "Bolivian marching powder" he sniffs less a stimulant than a sedative against fresh humiliations.

Jilted by his wife, a model, he thrashes in alternating comic torments of rage and grief and envisions a photo caption in The New York Post: "Sexually Abandoned Hubby Goes Berserk."

Each generation needs its Manhattan novel, and many ache to write it. But it was McInerney who succeeded - through the inspiration of the present-tense, second-person voice, the vehicle of false insinuating intimacy twinned with coolly ironic deflation.