“Instead of drug-addled club kids, McInerney’s novels are now populated by the charity ball circuit and Hamptons weekends. His characters have canes, pacemakers, eyebrow lifts, and regrettable Real Housewives appearances. It’s his real life in real time.”
At the Air Mail launch for Jay McInerney’s new novel, JANET MERCEL speaks to the author about NYC’s roaring 80’s, fine wine, and the (naughty) bathroom scene at The Odeon.
On a Monday New York night, it’s warm enough that mid-April feels like the middle of summer. The echo of cigarette smoke wafts down the table at The Odeon. Patrick McMullan darts about, pulling people into the frame of his camera, squishing us into photogenic groupings. Is it 1984? 2004? 2026? The time warp bubble contracts and shifts, covering generations of literary royalty in their original canteen. The energy is electric, and familiar. This is the world of Jay McInerney, where fiction blurs with nonfiction, and it all looks exactly as you might hope.
We’re here to celebrate McInerney’s new book, See You on the Other Side, the Covid-era conclusion to his long-running “Calloway” tetralogy. It’s all very meta– the first scene is a gathering of old friends at The Odeon, fictionalized riffs on the people passing through this very room. (In the first few pages, someone inquires if Eric Ripert is on the guest list. Minutes earlier, I see the real Eric Ripert drift by to say hello to the man of the hour.)
I ask McInerney if he envisioned the book party at the Odeon while writing his newest novel, his first in a decade. “No, but I mean, The Odeon has always been in my books,” referring partly to the iconic cover of the restaurant in Bright Lights, Big City. “I guess it kind of seemed appropriate. The party ought to be at Odeon.”
“I’m sure all you had to do was ask to make it happen,” I suggest.
“Well, that and there was an exchange of funds,” he cracks. “Sure, it would have been nice if they’d just given me a free party, but no, it wasn’t quite that good. But I’m sure we got a deal.”
The room swells. There’s the artist Will Cotton. Nancy Bass, third-generation owner of The Strand family book business. Binky Urban, legendary agent to Donna Tartt, Nora Ephron and Bret Easton Ellis. Molly Jong-Fast. The slightly terrifying literary agent David Kuhn. Sarah McNally of McNally Jackson, McInerney’s wife Anne Hearst. Then there are those of us who either weren’t born yet or were very small when Bright Lights came out; Emily Ratajkowski, Lost Lambs author Madeline Cash, Naomi Fry and Lilli Anolik, among them. Not that you’d know it by the current obsession with the zeitgeist. ‘80s and ‘90s New York is having a full-blown revival, with the magnetic Odeon still at its center. Some of the younger crowd, McInerney says, told him they first found out about the place from his book cover.
“His literary generation, was, McInerney acknowledges, the last to shoot into that stratosphere of fame, Hollywood star level. An exclusively dates models and heiresses level. A collecting premiere cru level.”
“Welcome to the site of all manner of hi-jinks and tomfoolery once upon a time,” drawls McInerney’s editor, Errol McDonald, to the room. “But when you find yourself waking up and going to work out and reading about your friend Jay McInerney in the weekend edition of the FT, in the sauna room at the Yale Club, you know times have changed.”
All evening, the requisite jokes are made about who spent too much time downstairs in the bathrooms with which celebrities. The list of well-known people who have done cocaine with McInerney is notoriously long. (Among them: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, almost certainly Boy George and Mick Jagger, to start.) Fashion designer Batsheva Hay tells me she used to work at The Odeon, about 20 years ago, when Kate Moss used to roll up during her brunch shift.
“Rule number two is no not drinking,” McInerney announces, referencing Monty Python. “Rule number five is also no not drinking.” Dutifully, the bottles of Meursault 2022 Cuvée Loppin, the Bordeaux, the Château Ducru-Beaucaillou, the Château Haut-Brion—he’s shared from his private collection—continue to pile up as he challenges his guests to get to the last bottle. The night turns misty.
A day after McInerney’s new novel comes out, I ask about his pub day traditions. After over a dozen books, I’m sure he has some. Does he sit around drinking a special wine while reading his reviews or something?
“There is definitely wine,” he says. After an appearance at the Strand bookstore with Anolik – “It was a great crowd. We filled up a room.”- there was a quiet dinner with his wife up the street at Seahorse, the big party having already passed. “Well, we started with champagne, of course, because you always have to start with champagne.” Then a bottle of Pierre Girardin, Puligny-Montrachet, Les Folatières. “And that was really good, they have these surprise bottles on the list.” (There was another friend at dinner to help sop up the fumes.) “And yeah, so I got a nice buzz on before I went home.”
If you’ve been missing McInerney’s musings on wine, you’re about to get another chance. Julia Vitale, the new editor of Air Mail and the party’s host, has just commissioned his new column “about wine, restaurants, and nightlife” — his fourth editorial stab revolving around oenophilia, following those at House & Garden, the WSJ, and Town & Country.
Critic or not, it’s hard to take issue with a new wine column. The first installment, he says, will begin at the beginning: with The Odeon, of course, and Monday night’s party. “Air Mail gave me a nice mandate, writing about eating and drinking around New York, and elsewhere. I travel a lot, so it won’t just be New York. It’s gustatory,” he says with relish. “Not just me sitting down and writing about Chardonnay. I think I can make the format into something fun. We’ll see.”
“Not many people get to have a Bright Lights, Big City on their resumé. It’s a good book and I’m glad I wrote it. I reread it a few years ago and thought, hey, this holds up pretty well.”
McInerney has always moved easily between mediums. After his first screenplay, the adaptation of Bright Lights, Big City, he wrote 1998’s Gia, launching the career of a young Angelina Jolie in what was also HBO’s first ever movie production. His literary generation, the Bret Easton Ellises and Donna Tartts, was, he acknowledges, the last to shoot into that stratosphere of fame, Hollywood star level. An exclusively dates models and heiresses level. A collecting premiere cru level. The kind of fame where you might worry about paparazzi flashbulbs “bleaching your soul,” as his old pal Norman Mailer once warned him.
Before Bright Lights was published in 1984, industry people cautioned McInerney that no one read books anymore, especially people his age. The book was printed straight to paperback, because the target audience of twenty-somethings weren’t spending money on hardbacks any more than they do today. The first run sold out, moving hundreds of thousands of copies within a year, and McInerney’s life was forever changed.
What does he make of younger generations’ current infatuation with the ‘80s and ‘90s? “I think they’re right. It was a really interesting time. All of us are a little bit nostalgic for the analog era.”
New York felt different when he first arrived in 1979. Dirtier, more dangerous, full of neighborhoods considered so undesirable that young people could actually afford to live in them. Chelsea, the East Village, the Lower East Side. “Now I’m not sure if there is an ungentrified neighborhood.” Back then, everything worth going to was walking distance from Washington Square Park. “Leo Castelli and Mary Boone were at the high end, but you also had this whole East Village gallery scene. People like Basquiat and Keith Haring were your neighbors, you know?”
“All those people went to The Mudd Club, and they all went to Odeon too. The cast of Saturday Night Live was always there. I would ogle the more fashionable diners. Because I didn’t usually eat much then,” he adds, unable to resist the wink. “Then I would go and try and get into The Mudd Club. I think there’s a good reason why people are so fascinated with that period. And I like to think I contributed my own part to it.”
What’s it like to still be fielding questions about a book he wrote over 40 years ago, especially when his new book party was less than 48 hours ago? He says he used to resent it. “People would come up to me and say, ‘I read your book,’ and I’d think, yeah, but I’ve written 12 of them. But not many people get to have a Bright Lights, Big City on their resumé. It’s a good book and I’m glad I wrote it. I reread it a few years ago and thought, hey, this holds up pretty well.”
McInerney’s characters have moved through time with him, which presents an interesting conundrum for critics. Do they want him to keep doing what he started four decades ago, or evolve? The answer is both and neither. Instead of drug-addled club kids, his novels are now populated by the charity ball circuit and Hamptons weekends. His characters have canes, pacemakers, eyebrow lifts, and regrettable Real Housewives appearances. It’s his real life in real time, and it was ever thus.
Does it land the same way it did then? Probably not. But the thing the critics miss is that we don’t care. While they grumpily debate the meaning of a modern McInerney novel, he keeps on finding new generations on his own terms. (He snagged my own generation in the mid-aughts with a cameo on Gossip Girl as Dan Humphrey’s novelist mentor. Life imitates art and vice versa.) Anyone who pretends they don’t know what to expect from McInerney is missing the point.
Buy See You on the Other Side by Jay McInerney HERE
