It may seem odd to think of McInerney as "shut out from all the luxury of the world" given that these articles are despatches from a world of what is for most of us a realm of privilege and indulgence. Yet at the core of this world is an almost unimaginable coarseness and poverty. One of the most vivid of these articles describes a New York wine auction at which a group of extremely wealthy men are bidding for the finest and rarest wines, while at the same time getting furiously drunk. "Stinky as the crack of a ninety-year old nun" is how one of them describes an aged Burgundy; "tighter than a fourteen-year-old virgin" says another about a champagne — maybe riskily, given the laws about the age of majority in the state of New York. These metaphors, in more decent garb, also appeal to McInerney; a recurrent feature of these articles is the comparison of a wine to an actress ("more Christina Hendricks than Gwyneth Paltrow").  The brutal avidity of these men for the best and finest vintages is driven negatively, by the fear of death. "Life is short," says one, "you've got to drink it." McInerney is on the fringes of this world, but he shares its malaise of fear and longing from which the pleasure of wine provides a temporary distraction. The complicated persona of his wine writing — a bitter literalising of that youthful gag about it being best to think of him as three people — reflects the fracturing of the self which arises from anxiety and yearning, and the consciousness of being estranged from the genuine and solid luxury of contentment. Taken together, these articles are profoundly elegiac.

So read The Juice as you might a novel, and if possible at a single sitting. It contains the best writing from McInerney since Bright Lights, Big City. And squinted at from the right angle, it is more genuinely affecting than the rest of his fiction put together.