Books in Brief

The Last of the Savages, by Jay McInerney (Knopf, 271 pp., $24)

YOU write a smashingly successful first novel. You have a gift for fast-paced narrative and nifty phrases. You also have ambitions, to move beyond the limits of your trademark novel (especially its gimmicky use of the second-person singular), to capture wide swaths of American social history. You write The Last of the Savages. You chronicle the friendship of straitlaced Patrick Keane, from a working-class background, with Will Savage, a tortured and visionary rebel from a privileged but cursed Southern family. Your new novel is at times smartly written. But your imagination shows serious strain whenever stretched beyond another self-obsessed, confessional narrator to larger territory, where it inevitably falls back on clichéor melodrama. You write sentences like “[Savage] had to struggle even harder against his heredity, and I could see that it was wearing on him.” You’ve got to be kidding.

About the Author

Rich Lowry

Rich Lowry is the editor in chief of National Review.

The Last of the Savages, by Jay McInerney (Knopf, 271 pp., $24)

YOU write a smashingly successful first novel. You have a gift for fast-paced narrative and nifty phrases. You also have ambitions, to move beyond the limits of your trademark novel (especially its gimmicky use of the second-person singular), to capture wide swaths of American social history. You write The Last of the Savages. You chronicle the friendship of straitlaced Patrick Keane, from a working-class background, with Will Savage, a tortured and visionary rebel from a privileged but cursed Southern family. Your new novel is at times smartly written. But your imagination shows serious strain whenever stretched beyond another self-obsessed, confessional narrator to larger territory, where it inevitably falls back on clichéor melodrama. You write sentences like “[Savage] had to struggle even harder against his heredity, and I could see that it was wearing on him.” You’ve got to be kidding.