Eight years after the publication of 1984’s Bright Lights, Big City, that riotous and audacious first novel about a twenty-something man crashing and burning in the glittering streets and shadier corners of Manhattan, Jay McInerney broadened his scope and produced a multistranded, multivoiced work. Published in 1992, Brightness Falls documented the charmed lives of New York yuppie couple Russell and Corrine Calloway at the tail end of the 1980s. From the outside, they seemed a perfect double act: “Their friends viewed them as savvy pioneers of the matrimonial state” — a sharp contrast to the unnamed protagonist of McInerney’s debut, with his “marital Pearl Harbor.” But the Calloways’ marriage became strained, first when Russell got in over his head planning a hostile takeover, and then when he mixed business with carnal pleasure with his financial helper.
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So began the Calloway saga. Each successive book in what turned out to be a series found Russell and Corrine older but not necessarily wiser. The Good Life (2006) and Bright, Precious Days (2016) charted their progress through subsequent decades as they weathered more personal upheavals (deaths of friends, extramarital affairs) and navigated global crises (9/11, the Lehman Brothers collapse). Along with their exploits, McInerney provided sign-of-the-times commentaries, sharp satirical swipes, and a colorful supporting cast of cultural movers and shakers, powerful hotshots and highfliers, and glamorous socialites and social climbers.
Ten years on from the last book, McInerney has returned to make what had been a trilogy into a tetralogy. See You on the Other Side, his fourth and final installment, could have been surplus to requirements. Instead, the novel is a worthy addition and constitutes both a welcome return and a bittersweet send-off.
It is the spring of 2020. Russell and Corrine, now in their 60s, are growing old gracefully. He is still an editor and publisher. She runs the Nourish New York initiative. Home, over the years, has been a loft in TriBeCa and then a brownstone in Harlem, but after their children, Storey and Jeremy, flew the nest, the Calloways downsized to a penthouse in Greenwich Village. All seems well, and one evening there is excitement in the air, and “the promise of metropolitan pleasure,” as the couple arrives at the Odeon to celebrate the 35th wedding anniversary of their best friends, Washington — for Russell, “the least likely monogamist” — and Virginia Lee.
But storm clouds are looming. Corrine is wary about news of an “impending plague.” Russell remains sanguine. “This virus scare just seems a little overblown to me,” he remarks — his famous last words echoing the breezy dismissal uttered by Corrine’s friend Casey in Brightness Falls: “That AIDS thing is so overhyped.” A number of cautious invitees play it safe and cancel, but the event goes ahead. Before the night is over, Russell receives a text from an admirer asking to see him again — a reminder to the reader that old habits die hard.
This isn’t the Calloways’ only social gathering. The pair attends the opening of their daughter’s Brooklyn restaurant. And Russell enjoys a session with fellow oenophiles at his wine club — a soiree Corrine brands as frivolous in light of rising coronavirus cases. “I would hardly call it frivolous,” Russell retorts. “Kip Taylor is opening a ’71 La Tâche.”
Soon, the virus wreaks havoc. Alongside the pandemic, McInerney folds the George Floyd protests into the narrative, enacting a scene in which Storey and her boyfriend, the Lees’ son Mingus, join a march and feel the brute force of the law.
But the spotlight for much of the novel is on Russell and his budding relationship with his mystery texter. It turns out to be Astrid Kladstrup from the last book. There she was, a young journalist who flirted with Russell over a liquid lunch. Now, 14 years on, she is a writer poised for literary stardom with a dazzling debut that is, in part, a fictionalized account of her romantic fling with novelist Philip Roth. After a chance encounter, Russell and Astrid pick up where they left off, and soon he is offering to publish her novel. Washington warns him of the ethics of his infatuation: Russell can’t possibly publish her and sleep with her. What Russell decides he can do is embark on “an emotional adventure.” He is owed it, he reckons, after Corrine found love among the ruins with banker Luke while volunteering at Ground Zero (a somewhat rich justification, considering Russell’s previous infidelities). But when tragedy strikes, Russell finds himself grappling not so much with issues of morality as mortality.
Critics of the Calloway series have taken its creator to task over recurring grievances. McInerney is prone to clunky exposition and repetition, they say. It is claimed that his books have little in the way of plot. Instead, his characters drift from one cocktail party, supper club, or charity gala to another. Perhaps the biggest criticism leveled against him is the all-too-apparent awe he has for those characters. Rather than skewer the pretensions and absurdities of the overprivileged elite, he paints affectionate portraits of them, presenting their gilded existence in warm hues and rose-tinted glows. When Washington announces “This is America, land of opportunism,” in Brightness Falls, it feels less like a scathing analysis and more like an open invitation to do whatever it takes to get to the top.
Admittedly, See You on the Other Side contains some of these signature faults. As ever, we find the obligatory references to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dylan Thomas, learn of drug-fueled deaths, encounter precociously talented writers, and follow reckless affairs (if not dangerous liaisons).
But the book’s strengths are decisive. Granted, it is largely plotless, but it is by no means directionless. McInerney delivers a variety of well-crafted scenes and standout set pieces. Some shouldn’t work, such as a dinner in which the guests discuss the merits of kale and Kanye West, or Russell’s boozy sessions with obscenely rich men. But McInerney ensures each episode is infused with enough wit and energy to render vacuous conversations entertaining and obnoxious loudmouths deliciously awful. There are the usual sumptuous passages about fine dining, routine scatterings of deft phrasings (self-publication is “a kind of purgatory for unbaptized books”), and captivating characters.
Once again, McInerney is at his most incisive when his focus is on the city he and his characters call home. In his previous books, individuals reacted to the grittiness of New York in the ’80s and the pros and cons of gentrification. This time around, McInerney has Russell reflect on the changing face of the “protean city” to measure how far he and Corrine have come. “It had been grand, it had been a paradise, in its way, in its time — a steel-and-concrete Eden,” muses Russell, as he takes stock of New York’s transformation since its heady golden age.
This volume is the shortest in the Calloway sequence. It is also the darkest, with that ominous title hinting at a sobering resolution. McInerney offsets his vibrant prose with some elegiac writing. Indeed, readers who have accompanied the Calloways through their many ups and downs may well find they have something in their eye as they approach the book’s closing pages. Brightness doesn’t fall here, nor does it fade.
Malcolm Forbes has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh.
