See You on the Other Side Author: Jay McInerney ISBN-13: 978-1037200755Publisher: BloomsburyGuideline Price: £20This is the fourth novel, and final chapter, following the lives of Russell and Corrine Calloway. He is a successful publisher and she a former stockbroker who runs a charity providing food for the poor. Their contemporaries, and children, are all comfortable Ivy League types. The novel begins with the advent of Covid. Death and uncertainty are in the air and there is a sense of the unknown yet of it all having happened before.There is an emphasis on interiors, restaurants, food and particularly wine: “ ... furniture, and black and white photographs. Le Corbusier. Mies. Adnet. Cartier-Bresson. Mapplethorpe. It looked ready for its close-up in Architectural Digest”.Perhaps this emphasis on the external encapsulates the characters but it becomes a bit tiresome – a menu rather than a book. If you followed these people in the earlier novels maybe you will care but I found it difficult. The prose offers no compensation – there is little pleasure or surprise in the words – it is bland and functional like the characters and their lives of consumption. There is note taken of whether people are good looking, their career trajectories and their success. The word artefact abounds to emphasise they are living in the last remaining room in the museum of their lives. Russell is attracted to a woman in an old picture in an art gallery; she looks like his wife but he has never told her – a nice representation of the need for secrets. Later he meets a young woman there – a nice touch of the palimpsest of desires. Desire and sex are excellently exercised with no prudery or purple prose. The neutral, functional prose serves these scenes well and captures the excitement, anticipation and consummation.In the beginning I found it hard to care about these characters but gradually the novel drew me in, only to then lose me. The last chapters accelerate through endings – an overdose, a suicide, a cancer death – and then the future generation are depicted as carrying on the baton. There is some heartfeltness towards the end but it is hard to care about these comfortable, shallow people who exist on the surface of things. Kevin Gildea is a comedian, writer and owner of Kevin Gildea’s Brilliant Pop Up Shop