Illustration by Liam Eisenberg.
Jay McInerney’s latest novel, See You on the Other Side, opens—humorously, fittingly—at the Odeon in Manhattan. “Stepping out of the cab into the twilight,” McInerney writes, “he felt a rush of nostalgia at the sight of the red-and-white neon sign hovering above West Broadway like an old movie title materializing on a dark screen.”
The glamorous Tribeca brasserie was made famous, or maybe more famous, in McInerney’s zippy, funny 1984 debut, Bright Lights, Big City, a work that, alongside Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, came to define an era and an attitude. It was the 1980s; bratty literary boys in blazers did cocaine in various downtown New York hot spots. For readers who have not engaged with McInerney’s work since then, it may come as a surprise (or not) that he has returned to the source—that is, the Odeon—many times.
Plenty of writers spend their careers circling the same preoccupations, the same geographical locations, the same set of human problems. But it is rare to find the novelist who has done so on such a hyper-specific level. At least four of McInerney’s nine novels involve the same neon-lit patch of ground on West Broadway and Thomas Street.
See You on the Other Side is the fourth, and likely the last, in McInerney’s Calloway series, which follows the Manhattan “golden couple” Russell and Corrine Calloway over the course of a long marriage. Reading it, I wondered how McInerney could possibly wring any new observations out of the same neighborhood, social milieu, and marriage. Could he perform a miracle and hit us with something new and profound about the Odeon’s mahogany bar and legendary bathroom, about staying married in spite of Manhattan’s many hazards, about going out in New York and growing old there?
The novel opens in the early days of Covid. As the virus bears down on the city, Russell and Corrine, now in their 60s, arrive at the Odeon to celebrate their old friend Washington Lee’s 35th wedding anniversary. Russell’s career has apparently flourished since we last met him; he now runs a publishing house, while Corrine, formerly a stockbroker, works for a nonprofit dealing with hunger. They have just moved from a town house in Harlem to a downtown apartment after the departure of their adult children.
The virus, at this point, is still a vague threat. The Calloways and their friends are not yet acclimated to the idea of social distancing or to the elbow bump, the “new greeting in this time of incipient plague”; they keep forgetting and kissing each other’s cheeks. But sharp, sensitive Corrine is nevertheless worried. “She was very concerned about the virus that had infiltrated their city,” McInerney writes, “convinced that it posed a serious threat, and as they gingerly navigated the room, they found others who shared her concern.” It takes about 100 pages, but that concern is finally validated: Corrine contracts the virus and has to quarantine in their new apartment. Meanwhile, Russell flirts with the idea of having an affair with a young novelist (Russell is more or less always flirting with the idea of having an affair) and tries to hold the publishing house together.
While the pandemic is everywhere in the book, See You on the Other Side proves to be a Covid novel without much to say about life during Covid. Corrine weathers her bout with the virus, while Russell grumbles about masking at Citarella. His fellow shoppers, he notes, look like “Japanese commuters.” The book’s style is reference-heavy without being especially satirical, a catalog of cultural figures, magazines, restaurants, and nice wines. A non-exhaustive list of mentions in the first half of the novel includes n+1, Kanye West, Harvey Weinstein, The New York Review of Books, Danny Meyer, Balthazar, The Real Housewives, Dylan going electric, 1996 Montrachet, and Lululemon.
As for the characters themselves, even if we don’t learn much about their inner lives, the book displays a deep affection for their external way of life. “The aromas of dark roast coffee and bacon infused the kitchen like a spritz of morning perfume,” one chapter begins. Russell belongs to a club of wine connoisseurs who bring their own bottles to Per Se, and he and Corrine vacation in Southampton. You get the impression that this is how McInerney himself, a noted gourmand and the author of three books about wine, lives his life.
After a slow-burn beginning—there is a lot of wondering about whether Covid will arrive—the book rushes to an ending, which deals with the death of a major character. A somewhat lackluster look at how the virus impacted well-heeled Manhattanites who mostly live by the scent of dark roast coffee and expensive bottles of white wine, See You on the Other Side doesn’t appear to offer much besides providing a conclusion for the series, a compulsory finish to what McInerney started more than three decades ago. We see how his golden couple live, but without knowing why.
Though to do justice to the novel, perhaps one must begin with the books that preceded it. Published in 1992 and set in 1987, Brightness Falls may seem to be deliberately titled to remind the reader of Bright Lights, Big City. But the novels are unrelated; the title comes from the Thomas Nashe poem “A Litany in Time of Plague”: “Brightness falls from the air; / Queens have died young and fair.” Like See You on the Other Side, Brightness Falls is a plague novel, set in the midst of the AIDS epidemic.
When we meet Russell and Corrine in Brightness Falls, they are newish Brown University graduates, five years married and living in a prewar apartment on the Upper East Side. Their friends think of them as “savvy pioneers of the matrimonial state.” They throw dinner parties that end in people passing out on their couch and try to remain sexually interested in each other. The book functions as a satire of the publishing and financial industries. Ungainly Russell—“Crash Calloway” to his friends—is a mid-level editor at a small but prestigious publishing house, while elegant Corrine works as a stockbroker selling junk bonds.
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Reviewing the book for The New York Times in 1992, Cathleen Schine described it as a “trash novel” as opposed to a serious one—more specifically, “an easy, entertaining trash novel.” This assessment holds: Brightness Falls is mean, pulpy fun in the mode of The Bonfire of the Vanities. It takes on the greed and optimism of the 1980s, culminating in the historic stock-market crash.
After Russell walks into his boss’s office one day and finds him with his hand inside a young assistant’s blouse, he catches the bullish spirit of the age and attempts a leveraged buyout of the company. This sets the plot in motion—Russell trying to pull off the deal and falling for his sexy business partner, while Corrine is left to her own devices downtown.
The book ends on a melancholy note that reaches for shades of Fitzgerald: “Whatever plenty befalls them together or separately in the future,” the last line intones, “they will become more and more intimate with loss as the years accumulate, friends dying or slipping away undramatically into the crowded past.”
Despite the downbeat ending, the novel remains enough of an irreverent satire that this is what the reader might expect from its sequel, The Good Life. But something curious happens instead: McInerney makes a 180-degree tonal shift from the comedic to the achingly sincere. To the book’s detriment, his perspective on these characters morphs from mocking to compassionate. Published in 2006, The Good Life is set in the shadow of 9/11, and yet it is less a time capsule of what happened in the months afterward than a portrait of how—at least in this novelist’s view—irony had gone out of style. After their introduction in the previous book as self-interested and self-important yuppies, Russell and Corrine (but especially Corrine) now attempt to become do-gooders. The day after 9/11, Corrine meets a rich finance guy named Luke emerging from the smoke of Ground Zero: “Staggering up West Broadway, coated head to foot in dun ash, he looked like a statue commemorating some ancient victory, or, more likely, some noble defeat.”
The two start volunteering at a soup kitchen for first responders, then embark on an affair. It’s love in the time of global catastrophe. We spend many, many pages with Corrine and her paramour, following him to Tennessee at one point, meeting his mom and learning, for some reason, about her own affair. Russell, sidelined for most of the book, distractedly mourns the loss of a friend who died in the attacks.
The book’s overwhelming sentimentality results in such convoluted sentences as: “[Luke] felt his eyes welling, charged with nostalgia for Christmases past, even as he experienced an unholy yearning to share the rituals of this and future seasons with someone not present—someone with her own family, with her own history and traditions, all of which seemed at this freighted moment to weigh more than his own selfish desire.” Perhaps it is this sentimentality that ends up keeping Russell and Corrine together. The affair wears on the Calloways without tearing them apart.
The third book in the series, Bright, Precious Days, is the least compelling of the four. If the first book embraces satire, and its sequel sincerity, then in Bright, Precious Days we get a tepid mix of the two. We follow the continuing affair between Luke and Corrine, while Russell attends, once again, to some trouble at the publishing house. There is a half-hearted plotline about a fraudulent memoir, echoing James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces scandal; there is a young short-story writer from Tennessee named Jack, who is too broadly drawn to care about. Mostly, the reader gets exhausted by how boring the Calloways have become: Corrine’s love affair drags on; she contemplates an eye lift and eventually dumps Luke. Russell finds out about the affair, but the novel ends with their marriage intact yet again. Nothing changes other than their habits of consumption: Once inundated with credit-card debt, Russell is now drinking better wines and sipping lattes with hearts in the foam.
Taken in this context, then, See You on the Other Side is actually a pretty good book. It is the Rabbit at Rest of the series and deals, more than any of the other books, with aging and mortality, and it does so with less of the cloying mawkishness and melodrama of the previous two novels. Characters start dropping dead abruptly and “undramatically,” fulfilling the prophecy of the final sentence of Brightness Falls. Yet the Calloways barely seem to care about these losses, let alone react. Russell’s wine-club buddy drives his car into a tree out in the Hamptons; later, McInerney’s sacramental substance, cocaine—so much fun back in the ’80s—kills off a promising young writer at the McKibbin Lofts. We are almost up to the present, and now the cocaine is laced with fentanyl—the author’s way of saying, I guess, that the party is truly over.
Does See You on the Other Side work on a stand-alone basis? Mostly not. Characters pop in briefly, only to be killed off or otherwise quickly disposed of. We check in on the fate of Corrine’s sister, whom Russell once habitually referred to as the “slutty little sister,” even though she donated the eggs that produced the Calloways’ children. If someone were to read just one of these books, I would suggest Brightness Falls, which is by far the most densely imagined and broadly comic. It also takes some interesting chances, containing a partial manuscript written by a friend of Russell and Corrine’s, a comic set piece about a high-profile photographer, and many antic, shifting points of view that sometimes work and sometimes don’t.
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Those readers following the series from the beginning will get some satisfaction in finding out how everyone ends up. (The Calloways’ children, for instance, become a chef and a Bernie bro.) But overall, the final book can’t compare to McInerney’s very best work, which is probably Bright Lights, Big City, and it can’t compare even to Brightness Falls. I mourned the softening of his once keen satirical eye. I kept thinking of Patricia Lockwood on John Updike’s oeuvre. “I read on and on,” she wrote, “waiting for him to become as good as he had been as a boy.”
At a certain point, McInerney seems to have run out of things to say about marriage. The stock market may crash and recover, buildings may fall and rise again, but the Calloways’ New York doesn’t actually change all that much. There are still the benefits to attend, and the cocktail parties and dinners for their fancy, eclectic friends. The Calloways still swing hard-to-get restaurant reservations and slightly out-of-reach beach vacations. They still cheat on each other and keep secrets and stay together.
“Each marriage is a mystery, an iceberg of which only a fraction is visible from the outside, above the surface,” McInerney writes early in See You on the Other Side, a metaphor unlikely to strike the reader as profound. Couldn’t the same be said about any individual or relationship?
Yet maybe what he’s getting at in these books is that marriages largely don’t change. They are more often static than dynamic, their patterns set in early, and the participants, if they stay together, are destined to repeat the same conflicts and the same actions over four novels’ worth of life. It’s a somber conclusion to what began as an exuberant and ironic project. It takes literal death to alter the Calloways’ marriage. At least they’ll always have the Odeon.
Erin SomersErin Somers is the author of the novels The Ten-Year Affair and Stay Up With Hugo Best.