.png)
2 hours ago
2
More than 40 years ago, Jay McInerney’s debut novel, Bright Lights, Big City, captured the glamour and desperation of 1980s New York. The book’s spectacular success launched its author’s career, earning him comparisons to F Scott Fitzgerald, another midwesterner with a complicated relationship with the US’s fantasies of wealth and social mobility. In 1992, Brightness Falls introduced readers to a fresh cast of young New Yorkers, but was primarily focused on a central couple, Corrine and Russell. McInerney returned to these characters in two subsequent novels; See You on the Other Side completes the tetralogy.
The book opens at the start of 2020 with the bright young things now in their 60s, coping with erectile dysfunction and marital woes, and fretting about the job prospects of their twentysomething children. In addition to the eternal problem of ageing, Corrine and Russell are about to confront the events of that tumultuous year: the pandemic, protests for racial justice and a bitterly fought presidential election campaign. Russell is the book’s main character, although we spend time with Corrine and make excursions into the points of view of their daughter, Storey, an aspiring chef, and her biracial boyfriend, Mingus.
At its best, See You on the Other Side offers the reader the chatty, undemanding companionship of commercial fiction. Will Russell be able to resist the extramarital attractions of hot young literary talent Astrid? Will Storey’s new restaurant thrive in spite of the regulations imposed during the pandemic? Will the ageing couple’s immune systems manage to fend off the virus?
One early challenge is that any reader will know of many people who suffered through much more during that terrible time. Still, it’s sort of fun being reminded about the inconveniences of lockdown, and I had forgotten about watching My Octopus Teacher.
A different issue is this. McInerney doesn’t seem to have made peace with the fact that he’s turning out a potboiler and keeps offering us glimpses of more tormented and ambitious writers. Alongside its title – a quote from a poem by the Elizabethan author Thomas Nashe – the most memorable thing about Brightness Falls was the character of the brilliant but doomed writer Jeff Pierce. In the present novel, his circle of ageing friends are still haunted by the idea of him and the thought that they have “in one way or another, compromised the high artistic ideals of their youth”.
Russell himself is a talented and successful fiction editor. “You have an amazing track record as a publisher,” Astrid tells him in a flirty encounter. “You’ve published some of my favourite contemporary novels.” There’s something so clunky and implausible about that second line of dialogue that it made me wonder what Russell would have made of the manuscript of See You on the Other Side, had it crossed his desk.
“Each marriage is a mystery,” McInerney tells us early on, “an iceberg of which only a fragment is visible from the outside, above the surface.” Russell would surely have excised this double cliche from the text. He would also notice a lot of relaxed-fit writing in the book. Things get repeated, often many times, as though the reader might not be paying attention. “He felt a stirring in his loins, an engorgement of his cock.” “Coke had once been a part of his life, the great social lubricant and love potion, the fuel of late nights on the town …” Wait! There’s more. “… the fairy dust of his youth.”
This verbosity makes a weird contrast with underwritten sections elsewhere. The tragedy of a disappointing fine wine merits many more words than the violent suicide of its owner a few paragraphs later. Half a dozen lines is all that’s needed to cover a man having a drug overdose at a Thanksgiving dinner. And when Russell encounters his son Jeremy in extraordinarily tense and unexpected circumstances, McInerney forgets to tell us if he’s surprised, or, in fact, if he feels anything at all.
The perfunctoriness of such moments gives rise to a feeling that the author isn’t really interested in them. What he wants to do – and does at great length – is write about wine, food, restaurants and real estate. Often these sections seem grouted in from magazine articles. Instead of describing a location, McInerney gives weird capsule reviews that read as if they’ve been lifted from Condé Nast Traveller. “They agreed to go to Marlow & Sons, the Williamsburg bodega-café-restaurant that was the mothership of the postmillennium Brooklyn dining boom.” Russell has no feelings when he is present at the overdose, but when he goes to an old-school Italian restaurant, he takes “a kind of ironic delight at its every kitschy detail”, and recalls that “a pair of younger New York chefs … polished and updated this formula and sold it back to the hipsters and finance bros who were desperate to pay fifty dollars for a bowl of penne alla vodka …” And so it goes on.
The bloviation seems mainly to reinforce the author’s claim to be a well-informed New York insider – a claim that was never in doubt. And yet, something interesting happens when Russell’s curmudgeonly brother Aidan shows up from Michigan, very late in the book. Aidan hates New York, and his reasons stir up something in Russell. “In times of crisis and self-doubt, Russell agreed with his brother, felt his midwestern soul quailing and recoiling [note those repetitions!] from the artifice and ego and excess [a hat trick!] of his adoptive home.”
But this intriguing version of Russell – depressed, suffering from impostor syndrome – is never on display in the novel. We are exposed to a character in lockstep with the values of his time and place, who never exhibits much curiosity about those beyond his social circle.
The early comparisons between Fitzgerald and McInerney now ring very hollow. Fitzgerald wrote with great precision and his vision of life was tragic, at odds with the dominant ethos of his time. McInerney’s prose is loose to the point of absurdity and he seems fully to embrace the materialism that surrounds him. It’s like seeing the world of Gatsby through the eyes of Tom Buchanan; a man clear-eyed about possessions and real estate, but not much interested in people’s internal lives, or given to wondering if the trappings of privilege are worth what their pursuit entails.
