I can’t remember where I was when I first read “Bright Lights, Big City.” It may have been Denver, where I was desperately plotting a return to the East Coast, or soon after I unpacked my bags in greater NYC and landed a publishing gig there. In any case, I will forever associate Jay McInerney’s breakthrough novel with my early post-collegiate years and my own brief flirtation with a literary life in Manhattan.
Like many, I was captivated by McInerney’s literary picaresque through Manhattan’s demimonde and the halls of a storied magazine. I even liked that the book was released under the groovy Vintage Contemporaries paperback line created by his editor pal Gary Fisketjon, though the “Bright Lights” movie adaptation starring Michael J. Fox was of no interest whatsoever when it arrived on the big screen a few years later. My own adventures in Manhattan’s publishing world were tame and brief: I very quickly decamped for Philadelphia, where, as the fates would have it, I became a fact-checker just like the narrator of “Bright Lights, Big City” except it was for TV Guide rather than a stand-in for the New Yorker and there were no decadent nights on the town fueled by Bolivian Marching Powder for me.
Circling back
Over time, I stopped following the work of my favorite authors from that period, tabloid fixture McInerney included, and my connections to the publishing world faded. That all changed when I began editing book coverage for L.A. Times last year. First, a press release about an Isabel Allende novel beckoned in an email, then one heralding the upcoming arrival of “See You on the Other Side,” the fourth novel in McInerney’s Calloway tetralogy.
I immediately wanted to read “See You” but hesitated: Would I still like McInerney’s work? Should I dive into it without having read the previous three novels? I took a flier and am happy to report that the answer to both queries was yes: I quickly slipped into the rhythm of McInerney’s prose again, decades later.
Still tempted after all these years
“See You on the Other Side” revisits Russell and Corrinne Calloway, now in their 60s, at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Their children are young adults and Russell a boutique publisher; Corrinne serves as director of Nourish New York, a non-profit that relies on restaurant food donations. They are moneyed bourgeoisie of an artier sort, at the novel’s outset unpacking boxes in a freshly purchased Greenwich Village penthouse after a decade in gentrifying Harlem. They socialize with even richer folk that keep them relatively humble.
Over the course of the novel, the Calloways and pals weather various crises, emotional and corporeal. Russell, an alter ego of the author, faces temptation much like the narrator of “Bright Lights”; in an echo of that seminal book, the aging publisher narrowly avoids disaster during a dubious cocaine-laced rendezvous with a promising young writer late in the novel. McInerney weaves in enough backstory from earlier book installments to make it easy for the uninitiated to follow along. Does the prose seem overly baggy with characters verging on self-satisfied? Yes again, though to the latter point one could argue that might be McInerney’s intent as a gentle satirist with a fondness for the good life himself. (He was a wine columnist for the Wall Street Journal so he knows his way around a good vintage.)
How it all began
To make sure I wasn’t missing out on previously established details central to a rich appreciation of “See You,” I downloaded “Brightness Falls,” the 1992 novel that introduces us to Russell and Corrinne, a young married couple whose world is rocked by the AIDS epidemic and the brutal 1987 stock market crash. This gave me additional insight into Russell and Corrinne’s formative friendship with writer-to-be Jeff Pierce at Brown and the tetralogy itself, but didn’t answer my nagging question: How does the writing of these books really compare to “Bright Lights, Big City”? Was I misremembering my introduction to McInerney’s prose after so much time?
‘Bright Lights’ revisited
Dear reader, I was not. “Bright Lights, Big City,” a slim 182 pages to 304 for “See You on the Other Side” and 415 for “Brightness Falls,” is much tauter than its baggier successors; tellingly, it started as a short story for the Paris Review before McInerney turned it into a novel. Rereading it four decades later, I found myself less interested in the narrator’s misadventures in the Department of Factual Verification (maybe because I have worked in a magazine research department) and Gotham nightclubs (generally avoid such things) than the poignant revelations later in the book. That part I hadn’t remembered.
“Less Than Zero” arrived shortly after “Bright Lights, Big City,” and critics immediately lumped the two novels together, but Bret Easton Elllis’s novel never grabbed me the same way; I found it a chillier, name-dropping affair. In my view, McInerney’s distinctive second-person narration is key to the book’s enduring appeal: reproachful self-talk is hugely relatable even to those of us unlikely to ever unleash a ferret in a former boss’s office after hours. Russell’s first-person narration in “See You on the Other Side” can be similarly rueful; there’s grace to that humanity.
McInerney has always been open about considering Russell an alter ego from a counter life: His character has stayed married to his college sweetheart, unlike McInerney, whose fourth wife is Patty Hearst’s sister, and is an editor rather than a writer. Similarly, reading “See You on the Other Side” gives me a fictional glimpse of the New York publishing world I left behind so long ago. It’s a nice place to re-visit.
Now, excuse me while I listen to the Clapton song this missive is named for and go find a copy of “House of Spirits.”
Endnotes
- Some critics have a much harsher view of “See You on the Other Side” than I do: NYT critic Dwight Garner hated it, while Erin Somers dubbed it a compulsory finish lesser to both “Bright Lights, Big City” and “Brightness Falls” in her critique for the Nation. Mark Athitakis, a critic I had the pleasure of editing for LAT, takes a more complimentary view toward “See You on the Other Side” and McInerney’s work in his Bloomburg review, calling his Manhattan-centric novels underrated while comparing Russell to protagonists in novels by John Updike and Philip Roth. Perhaps the key to enjoyment is not to have read the quartet in publication order.
- For more about Vintage Contemporaries, read this New Yorker story and note the mention of the World Trade Center towers on the cover of “Bright Lights” in this story from 2012. Last, NYT’s Gina Bellafante revisited “Bright Lights” for its 40th anniversary in 2024.
This first appeared on my Lititude Substack.