When Jay McInerney published his debut novel, “Bright Lights, Big City,” in 1984, he was immediately hailed as the F. Scott Fitzgerald of a new generation. The novel, narrated in the second person, recounted the hedonistic life of a twentysomething aspiring writer who by day worked (hung over) as a fact-checker at a literary magazine (unmistakably The New Yorker, where Mr. McInerney once worked), and by night partied himself to oblivion — anything to suppress the grief of losing his mother and being left by his wife.
“You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning,” reads the book’s opening line — the place being either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge, real-life 1980s yuppie nightclubs. The time is lost between last call and dawn, and the reader can feel the drunken, cocaine-addled agony of having to choose between keeping the party going with the cool girl, knowing what will follow in the morning, or calling it a night.
Mr. McInerney, famously, was writing from experience.
“We’ve had a lot of fun together, bordering on too much fun,” said Morgan Entrekin, publisher of Grove Atlantic, who has been friends with the author since the 1970s. “But that’s calmed down a bit in our very late youth.”
Mr. McInerney, at 71, is living a very different existence than his Bolivian marching powder days. It was late March, just before noon, and he was in pursuit of a bowl of ramen after finishing a workout with a personal trainer over Zoom.
“Best of all is being young in the city,” Mr. McInerney said. “Which I no longer am. But I am certainly not about to give up on it.”
Still, the life change was inevitable. “I’ve traded cocaine for fitness,” he said.
On Tuesday, “See You on the Other Side,” the fourth and final book in Mr. McInerney’s best-selling series that began in 1992 with “Brightness Falls,” hit the shelves. The tetralogy, which also includes “The Good Life” and “Bright, Precious Days,” from Mr. McInerney’s longtime publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, have tracked the marriage of Russell and Corrinne Calloway. They set New York’s ambitious culturati against the sometimes immovable forces of market crashes, race relations, monogamy, Sept. 11 and, with “See You on the Other Side,” the Covid pandemic.
The scope of Mr. McInerney’s new book, exploring the intersections of art, money, class and power, spans the days from “Wall Street” through the age of “Succession.”
If the earlier books once defined youthful urban cool, “See You on the Other Side” is more autumnal. It is the story of growing older in downtown Manhattan, which has been Mr. McInerney’s beloved home and his canvas for the better part of five decades.
“One advantage is that the writer has been aging at the same rate as his characters, so Jay knows what it’s like to be a vigorous oldster in the city where he came to manhood,” said his friend Julian Barnes, whose own novels have sometimes tracked characters across decades in London.
When Writers Were Famous
Neighborhoods change. Scenes shift from the legendary rock club CBGB on the Bowery up to East 14th Street at the Palladium nightclub, and with it, the soundtrack, featuring Talking Heads, Madonna and LCD Soundsystem. The clownish real estate scion mocked in “Brightness Falls” becomes president. The assistants and fact checkers who once sold to the Strand the books they poached from the office so they could buy a single cocktail at The Odeon — the TriBeCa bistro that appears on the cover of “Bright Lights” — would themselves become famous. Even the neon-orange Odeon sign from the iconic cover of “Bright Lights” — a novel that launched Vintage Contemporaries, an original line of literary fiction trade paperbacks — reappears as a tattoo just below the hip of millennial writer Lena Dunham.
Through it all stands Mr. McInerney, the novelist who was once tabloid fodder and, for years, the narrator of a Manhattan literary milieu that might disappear with him.
“I wasn’t as famous as Brad Pitt,” Mr. McInerney said, “but for a writer, I was insanely famous. I would walk down the street, and people would ask for my autograph. It’s something that only happens in Paris now.”
On this late winter morning, Mr. McInerney was relating the stories of his New York, as he strolled blocks filled with ghosts real and imagined. There was his first apartment on Jones Street in the West Village, where he lived in the late 1970s; his loft in the East Village, on East Fifth Street, which he shared with Gary Fisketjon, his Williams College classmate who would create Vintage Contemporaries, an imprint of Random House, and become his editor at Alfred A. Knopf. Jean-Michel Basquiat had his studio on nearby Great Jones Street. One night, in need of money to pay his drug dealer, Mr. Basquiat tried to sell Mr. McInerney a painting for $500, but the writer had only $30, he recalled.
“Everywhere I look, there’s history for sure,” Mr. McInerney said. “What was especially wonderful about that period was that young creative people could afford to live here, and there were a hell of a lot of them. From the point of view of a downtown writer, artist, whatever, almost everything that was culturally interesting took place within walking distance of Washington Square Park.”
These days, Mr. McInerney lives in a penthouse apartment, its walls lined with beautiful first-edition copies of novels by his literary hero, F. Scott Fitzgerald. And on another wall hangs something even more impressive: a handwritten letter Mr. Fitzgerald sent to a high school student seeking writing advice.
“I should say the people for you to read were James Joyce, Aldous Huxley, H.L. Mencken, Anatole France and Flaubert. Though perhaps these should wait till you’re 20,” Mr. Fitzgerald wrote. He added: “Remember your English teachers are almost invariably wrong when they talk of things less than a hundred years old.”
Not bad for a kid whose father, a salesman at a paper company, frequently moved the family around the East Coast, Canada and Britain. Mr. McInerney moved to New York City with his girlfriend, Linda (who later became the wife who left him), several years after graduating from college in 1979. As inspired as he was by the way suburbia was portrayed by John Cheever, John Updike and Philip Roth — the writers who made the greatest impression on him — Mr. McInerney had his own mise-en-scène in mind.
“I didn’t want to write about a guy who publishes a novel and it makes him famous,” Mr. McInerney said. “I wanted to write a history of my time in New York and make it more.”
See You at The Odeon
“See You on the Other Side” returns to The Odeon, a dazzling set piece from those bewildering prepandemic days when the mere idea of lockdown seemed unimaginable. Initially, Mr. McInerney didn’t want to write a shutdown novel.
“My first thought was, I didn’t want to go near it. It seemed constricting,” he said. “I write about social New York. Social New York ceased to exist on March 20, 2020.”
The title came early: a sign posted on a coffee shop when “the other side” seemed just days away, not months. Mr. Entrekin described the joys of Mr. McInerney’s novels as capturing what the critic Lionel Trilling once called the “hum and buzz of implication.” But the challenges of a Covid novel became appealing to Mr. McInerney once he began to tune into that buzz of families shut inside, infidelities practically turning Elizabethan, with desperate lovers limited to texting one another. Masks and shutdowns scrambled liberal politics, and Hamptons dinner parties upset mores, especially in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests, where battles over policing brought things to a boiling point.
“People come here in order to be close to other people, to mix and mingle and cross-pollinate. There was none of that in the pandemic to speak of. No theater, no restaurants, no art openings, no parties,” Mr. McInerney said, adding that the enforced solitude boosted productivity. He completed not only this final chapter in the marriage between Corrine and Russell Calloway, but also a memoir yet to be announced. Two serious health scares in 2024 shaped the reflective tone.
“When I started writing about this couple, they were young and glamorous,” the author said. “They were just hitting 30, which is a special time in the life of anybody. Now they’re in their 60s and it’s time to say goodbye.”
Mr. McInerney, who has been married three times, imagines Russell’s life as what might have been his. “One of the things that I wanted to do in this book, and in this series, was to write about a marriage that’s unlike my own, that survives despite the trials and tribulations, despite the particular stresses and temptations of life in Manhattan. It’s harder to be married in New York than it is elsewhere in the world.”
Aging lands in ways both profound and comic. The Calloway kids hang out at their parents’ old haunts like the KGB Bar in the East Village, knowing they’ll no longer run into them there after 8 p.m.
“I wish I had a time machine,” Mr. McInerney said. “On the other hand, I’m not sure I want to inherit the New York of 10 years from now. There is a consolation in old age in sensing that you may have experienced some of the best.”
Back in the “Bright Lights” days, Mr. McInerney thought he wouldn’t live long enough to worry about any of this. “My role models were all dead by 44. Dylan Thomas was 39. Keats was 26. Fitzgerald was 44.” Raymond Carver, Mr. McInerney’s mentor at Syracuse University, where Mr. McInerney earned an M.A. in English, recognized a certain brand of talent and trouble in the young writer, and offered a different cautionary tale. While teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Mr. Carver pulled into the liquor store near the university before it opened, only to find Mr. Cheever, a fellow instructor, already parked and waiting.
Grizzled icons can provide lessons in longevity as well. Once at a poetry festival in Italy, Mr. McInerney was at dinner with Lou Reed, when a bread basket arrived. He reached for a slice.
“Hey, don’t do that,” Mr. Reed growled. “The carbs will kill you.”
On Monday night at The Odeon, there was no bread on the table, where Mr. McInerney, his wife, Anne Hearst McInerney, and AirMail magazine hosted a private dinner to celebrate this last chapter at the venue where it all began. Just like old times, the party was packed with boldface names, like Cynthia Rowley, a designer; Madeline Cash, a novelist; Emily Ratajkowski, a model; Eric Ripert, a chef; and Molly Jong-Fast, a pundit; as well as old publishing friends, Mr. Fisketjon, Mr. Entrekin and the literary agent Binky Urban. Mr. McInerney announced that he had curated six red wines that would be poured from six-liter bottles.
“We will see,” he said, “just how much stamina you have.”
The post Aging in a Brightly Lit, Big City appeared first on New York Times.
