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 ... Does See You on the Other Side work on a stand-alone basis? Mostly not.
McInerney’s lens has generally been soft-focus, tailored for readers who imagine the city as the place they ought to be, or could never consider leaving. But as he closes accounts in the new book, the existential challenges for both the city and the Calloways have only grown ... The title of See You on the Other Side is double-edged. The book is deeply concerned with mortality, and the novel’s arc puts a definitive end to the series. But it is also about what happens when a whole city seems to shift from the 'art and love' team to 'power and money' ... Toward the very end of See You, Corrine recalls how Russell once read her the final chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Molly Bloom’s ecstatic and orgasmic stream-of-consciousness monologue. It’s a tick pretentious of McInerney, using Joyce’s big finish to end his own. But it’s also charming, an assertion of human connection amid a troubled marriage in a troubled city. So many negative forces have hit the Calloways, but McInerney reserves his right to deliver one last affirming yes.
The story unfolds in the episodic fashion of television dramas, ticking off topical conflicts such as the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests and the #MeToo movement as they bear upon the Calloways and their daughter, Storey, who is opening a Brooklyn bistro at the worst possible moment ... All this will be to your tastes or not, but credit Mr. McInerney with not being self-important about his material ... Mr. McInerney had his turn as a celebrated literary arriviste. Now he’s enjoying himself.
Much of the book is an exercise in frustration. The only interesting character — an opinionated contrarian named Avery Finch — disappears early on. Two chapters end with portentous cliff-hangers, but then are dropped. As the end of the book approaches, events pile up, scattered across the pages instead of sunk into them. One character overdoses and it merits half a page; another dies in a car crash — in nine lines ... The book reads smoothly and there are some nice observations on ridiculous aspects of modern culture ... But there’s none of the 'quickening of the pulse' that Russell identifies as a symptom of reading a great novel ... As a novel about people getting older, See You on the Other Side is suffused with a sense of past glories, never to be recovered. I wonder what gave McInerney that idea?
Elegiac and quasi-autobiographical ... The fizz is almost entirely out of the bottle ... It takes a beat or two for another of McInerney’s trademark touches to hove into view. When it does it swamps this novel’s equilibrium even more soundly than do the wooden and expository dialogue and the gauzy, platitudinous observations about New York City, the Hamptons and marriage ... A landslide of unironic conspicuous consumption ... It depressed me to so thoroughly dislike this novel.
At its best, See You on the Other Side offers the reader the chatty, undemanding companionship of commercial fiction ... 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 ... 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 is McInerney’s signature touch to subtly explore how catastrophe reveals rather than transforms character. McInerney’s elegiac prose incisively tracks how the pandemic disrupts the comfortable rhythms of daily life while exposing deeper socioeconomic fractures in American society ... As a culmination of the Calloway tetralogy, the novel offers an exquisite meditation on mortality, resilience, and cultural obsolescence, a poignant coda that illustrates the power of human connection as part of a life well-lived ... A literary event that will galvanize readers.
The Calloway family and their friends are not always likable, but the story is never boring, and at times, it’s quite moving ... For readers who enjoy family drama with a touch of self-deprecation and New York City settings.
As the curtain closes on the Calloways’ fraught love story, faithful readers will feel sad but satisfied ... The reliable pleasures of McInerney’s writing make even this darkest chapter a fun read.
