Many of Jay McInerney’s characters had their glory days in the 1980s and 1990s of his vivid early novels, with all of the excesses and freedoms that he captured, most famously in his 1984 debut Bright Lights, Big City. As familiar as New York’s landmarks and favourite haunts remain, the city of 2020 can seem a bewildering landscape for his creations, even before the darkened lights of the pandemic.
The Calloways are the literary ‘It couple’ about whom McInerney first wrote in the elegiac Brightness Falls (1992). Now, in See You on the Other Side, friends and acquaintances get hit by #MeToo with the kind of randomness reserved for corked wine or a careless investment. Russell Calloway, the publishing editor and big-hearted hedonist falling headlong through life, isn’t cancelled… quite. Meanwhile, his wife Corrine carefully maintains appearances, along with a youthful image, by any means. In Brooklyn, they struggle to find a martini, and if you’re looking for a barman, a beverage director can put you straight. Out of their comfort zone, they’re told by a twentysomething: ‘We actually don’t stock vodka… We just feel it lacks character, that it’s a neutral spirit in the strictest sense of the word… Many of us in the artisanal cocktail community share that sentiment.’ So much for the most popular spirit on the planet.
Russell wonders, too, ‘when auto-fiction had replaced autobiographical fiction’, as he tries to avoid a fling with a young writer he’d like to publish and chastises himself for searching for her life story in her work. ‘In general, he despised this line of enquiry… Yet he couldn’t suppress his intense curiosity in this case.’ With their persuasive voices and astute social observations, certain characters are often thought to be modelled on McInerney himself. But call it autofiction or whatever you want – what a great reminder this is of the old days. McInerney has had terrifying health crises in recent years and a sense of life’s fragility pervades the book.
Since Brightness Falls, we have followed the Calloways in two other novels set at crisis points in their marriage, but this one has an emotional depth that shows McInerney at his best. In a nod to the mythic qualities of literary New York, there are two vivid set pieces that take place at the Odeon, the downtown restaurant which appeared on the cover of his debut more than 40 years ago. His fans will be pleased that McInerney, aged 71, is still writing. The vodka martini is on me.
Comments