SEE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE

The fourth and final installment in the saga of a well-heeled Manhattan family.

Russell and Corrine Calloway face a sobering finale in McInerney’s conclusion to his tetralogy, written over the course of 34 years. It opens in the early spring of 2020, just as the first effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are being felt; it’s just what you’d expect of this prominent pair that they attend glitzy back-to-back social gatherings despite the growing sense of alarm that will soon put a stop to such things. The first is an anniversary celebration for their best friends, Washington and Veronica Lee; like the Calloways, this couple has weathered major infidelities and come out the other side, and their respective children, Storey and Mingus, have evolved from childhood friends to romantic partners. The second is the opening of chef daughter Storey’s new restaurant; the reader is painfully aware how inopportune this timing will be. Finally, Russell will attend his monthly wine dinner, a somewhat appalling event where eight extremely rich men (as a publishing guy rather than a finance guy, he is the plebe of the group) gather in a private room at Per Se to open bottles valued in the four and five figures, paired with endless courses of gourmet concoctions; as always, McInerney’s food and wine writing glows. Wife Corrine is much less sanguine about all this than her husband, and indeed the body count eventually racked up in this episode of the saga is high; the coronavirus is not the only villain. As a writer whose early work famously celebrated the joys of “Bolivian marching powder,” it is fitting that McInerney includes fentanyl among the evils of that annus horribilis; police brutality, racial unrest, and cancer appear as well. 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.