Jay Walks

''There was a backlash. I got so much attention for my first novel — and for everything that I did back then, every party I went to, every girl I dated — that people got sick of hearing my name. I don't blame them. God knows, I got sick of hearing it.''

The note on Jay McInerney's door says to ''Meet me out back.'' Sure enough, there he is, skinny-dipping in the pool at his new home in Nashville. ''Three years ago, I couldn't imagine leaving New York,'' says the 37-year-old novelist after he paddles out of the water and puts on a pair of jeans. ''But I don't miss it at all. This is a healthier lifestyle for a writer.''

Could this be the dawn of a brand-new Jay? The author of Bright Lights, Big City, the 1984 nightlife novel chronicling the cocaine-dusted adventures of New York's ultrachic club crowd, has swapped downtown glitz for Dixie grits and is reinventing himself for the 1990s. Along with his new Tennessee digs (a cozy stone-and-stucco cottage), he's settling down with a new wife, Helen Bransford, a 43-year-old Southern socialite whom he married in December after a whirlwind six-week courtship. There's also a new best-selling novel, Brightness Falls, a big, ambitious book that's finally burying his image as a literary lightweight and winning kudos from the critics for a change.

''I'm tired of people thinking I'm some drug-addled party boy,'' he sniffs. ''I'm tired of being a symbol for all the excesses of the 1980s.''