Jay McInerney once had the kind of literary fame that spilled out of book pages and into the gossip columns. At 29, after Bright Lights, Big City was published in 1984, he became an overnight celebrity, and by 1987 he was grouped with Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz in the “brat pack” label that helped turn a generation of young novelists into tabloid figures.
Now 71 and still living in Manhattan after the best part of 50 years, McInerney is back with See You on the Other Side, the fourth novel in his Calloway series, which follows Russell and Corinne through major stretches of New York history, this time through the Covid pandemic. He met an interviewer at the Mayfair branch of Noble Rot in London at 1 p.m., ordered a glass of 2023 Burgundy and, when asked about drink, said he takes the edge off at night but knows where the line is: “I drink a lot at night. You gotta draw the line somewhere, or else just be an alcoholic.”
That shift matters because McInerney’s career has always been tied to the changing city around him. Before fame, he worked in the fact-checking department at the New Yorker, and Raymond Carver urged him to write Bright Lights, Big City before he was fired shortly before it appeared. The Calloway books have since tracked New York’s financial and emotional shocks in sequence: Brightness Falls in 1992 against the boom of the 1980s, The Good Life in 2006 after 9/11, and Bright Precious Days in 2016 in the wake of the 2008 crash.
McInerney’s old notoriety was rooted in nightlife, socializing and affairs, the sort of life that once made him seem like a fixture of a very specific Manhattan era. He still talks like someone who has not fully left that world behind. Asked about the current literary landscape, he brushed aside the idea that one writer dominates the field, saying, “I mean – no one writes about what Jonathan Franzen is doing!” Then he turned back to the drink list and asked, “Do you like sherry?” The answer to where he fits now is simpler than the legend around him: McInerney is no longer the city’s young sensation, but he remains one of the few writers still using New York’s last half-century as the raw material for his fiction.