He has been a roguish night crawler, a faithful chronicler of the preppy party class and their vodka and tonic-fueled lurch through life, a wry-tongued gourmand and a gouged-eye witness to the emotional upheaval of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. With such a contemporary, detail-fueled fascination with the social world of his New York, Jay McInerney hardly feels like the type of writer to gravitate to the tidier, tinier court of the short story.

So it's a surprise to discover in "How It Ended," a new and selected collection of tales, that the author of "Bright Lights, Big City" has maintained more than a passing interest in the short form. Indeed, in an introduction McInerney explains how his famous first book began as a short story, the early version of which appears herein, alongside other stories that touch upon his usual themes -- money, marriage and the social jostling involved in both.

None of the characters in "How It Ended" feels particularly well suited to marriage, and that reluctance leads to unusual circumstances. In "Sleeping With Pigs," an inveterate New York playboy marries into a storied clan of Southerners and before long finds himself ensconced in a sprawling Southern manse for six months out of the year, sharing a bed with his wife and their pet pig.

Being a bemused anthropologist of coupling has benefits for a storyteller: You can get a reader's attention. "Invisible Fences," a story about the long half-life of infidelity, begins as its narrator returns home to find his wife performing oral sex on a stranger.

It's sometimes hard not to wish McInerney relied less upon the obvious social markers to place his reader in this realm. "Madonna of Turkey Season," a rather aborted tale of brothers competing to bring home the loveliest holiday guest, is littered with too many towns and prep school names, details that will be lost on some readers and, ultimately, to time.

McInerney's characters are engaging because they are continually falling into a trap that even their wealth cannot protect them from: They cannot tell the difference between living fully, and living without limits. "I think life is best viewed as a series of improvisations," says one of them. As anyone who has been married will tell you, this works for a while, until it doesn't. Children arrive, planned or unplanned. Parents and loved ones die before their time.

In the collection's gem, an aging bachelor hits the end of his run of womanizing and decides to get married. The night before his wedding, however, he phones in one last rendezvous. And so the narrator -- that woman who gets the call -- watches on with "morbid fascination" as the fellow tries to fool himself into believing he lives outside of the social order that made him. He doesn't -- but as these tales remind, that social order has a safety net of sorts, one that has made divorce lawyers all around New York extremely wealthy.

John Freeman is the American editor of Granta magazine.