Sometime in the 1990s, I was sitting at a table in the Groucho Club with two glamorous female novelists, one posh junkie, a fading pop star and Jay McInerney. It was set to be one of those crazy, coke-fuelled evenings that McInerney had chronicled so brilliantly in his debut novel about New York’s decadent demimonde, Bright Lights, Big City (1984). That book made him internationally famous and even started a trend among the young authors I knew to ‘do a Jay’ and write the Great London Novel. The evening ended, for me at least, not with a bang or a bonk – hell, there wasn’t even any blow – just a cup of cocoa in bed before midnight.

I imagine that might provoke a smile of recognition from Russell Calloway, the protagonist of See You on the Other Side, and patron saint of all us old blokes who once walked on the wild side. This is the fourth instalment – after Brightness Falls (1992), The Good Life (2006) and Bright, Precious Days (2016) – tracing the fortunes of Russell and his wife, Corrine, members of Manhattan’s cultural elite. The setting is 2020. The pandemic is just starting and the city that never sleeps is shutting down. McInerney offers a rich and detailed account of those times that chronicles everything from the elbow bumps to economic busts. It’s an attempt to write the Great American Covid Novel.

At the centre of the story is Russell and Corrine’s troubled marriage. She is the well-connected socialite who works to feed New York’s hungry. He is an ageing publisher who drinks his morning latte from a New York Review of Books mug with an image of Joan Didion on it.