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Summary
Summary
Following the success of Brightness Falls--"his most ambitious novel" (The Boston Globe)--Jay McInerney now gives readers a sweeping story of a friendship as complex as it is abiding. Interweaving deeply personal dilemmas and the politics of race, sex, family, and society, The Last of the Savages moves from New England to the deep South and beyond, from the fevers of youth to the uneasy truths of middle age.
Author Notes
Jay McInerney was born in 1955 in Hartford, Conn. and earned his B.A from Williams College in 1976. He did postgraduate study at Syracuse University, and was a Princeton in Asia fellow in 1977.
McInerney's career includes stints as a newspaper reporter, a textbook editor, and a fact checker for the New Yorker magazine. His writing has appeared in a variety of periodicals including Paris Review, Vogue, and Atlantic Monthly. His books include "Model Behavior," "The Last of the Savages," and "Bright Lights, Big City."
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Affirming and wise, McInerney's latest (after Brightness Falls) opens in a setting familiar to other extraordinary American novels: the ivy-swaddled campus of a New England boarding school. Here, two students meet as roommates in the mid-1960s: Will Savage, a quixotic Southern bad boy bewitched by the blues, and Patrick Keane, the more reserved and ambitious narrator, bent on defying his humble origins. The two form one of youth's unlikely yet intangible friendships, permanently tethering their quite different paths. Will scours the back roads of the Delta for blues, quickly emerging as a player in the booming record industry, while Patrick grinds his way to the top of the country's elite academic and legal institutions. As Will disavows his old-fashioned, wealthy father, Patrick finds in the patriarch a beguiling mentor. Will is a radiant characterthe sort of self-consuming talent who sinks his teeth into life's fruit while the rest of us wait in linethe sort we look upon, as Patrick does, with a volatile mix of admiration, pique and envy. With the humanity of an older man, yet with an accuracy that trips nerves long left for dead, Patrick recalls bygone days when, as he says at the end of this warm, wondrously empathetic work, "I knew, at least for a little while, what it was like to be free." (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
The ravages of a self-destructive lifestyle have taken their toll on music mogul Will Savage. The son of wealthy Tennesseeans, he is the last in his family line. A born rebel, he is the kind of person who is destined for great things. He socializes with Negroes on pre-gentrified Beale Street, smokes marijuana with Mick Jagger in Morocco, records old blues singers (ala Alan Lomax) and new ones, and bows to no authority, especially his father, an eccentric patriarch whom Will is convinced had something to do with the assassination of Martin Luther King. McInerney's sprawling new novel, encompassing three decades and various regions of the U.S., is a bit schizophrenic and hard to categorize. Is it an East Coast prep-school coming-of-age novel or a southern family drama featuring a classic Oedipal struggle? A '60s tale of excess or an '80s tale of success? Anyway, it demands a sure hand to make it work. Although never heavy-handed or pretentious, McInerney touches on too many ideas and covers too much ground to be entirely successful at the task; for instance, he draws connections between the days before emancipation and the civil rights movement that are interesting but remain tenuous. Yet McInerney's intelligent prose is a pleasure to read, and bigger-than-life Will Savage is a memorable character. (Reviewed March 15, 1996)0679428453Benjamin Segedin
School Library Journal Review
YAWill Savage and Patrick Keane meet at an exclusive New England prep school in the late `60s. Will is from a wealthy Southern family; Patrick is a scholarship student with a blue-collar background. Both are trying to escape their pasts. Patrick becomes a successful New York lawyer and avoids his parents; Will embraces rock and soul music and a radical life style, deliberately defying his parents by befriending and promoting black musicians and their causes. The men's unlikely friendship lasts a lifetime, and is both strained and strengthened by their differences. Patrick, at first accepting of Will's largesse and admiring of his self-confidence, over the years becomes a source of support for Will, whose early success as a promoter fades, and whose drug and alcohol excesses threaten his health. YAs will recognize many of the musicians and styles depicted in this novel and will find its picture of the popular music world of the `70s and early `80s fascinating. They will identify with many of the themes presentedfamily ties that can be both binding and suffocating; school friendships that remain strong; and the dominant role money plays, especially its use both as a weapon and to redress past inequities. Some teens may find certain themes and language offensive, but the issues presented are universal, and their resolutions both provocative and entertaining.Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
From the hokey title to the sentimental insight of the last line, McInerney's latest yuppie melodrama (Brightness Falls, 1992, etc.) at best recalls the social-climbing novels of John O'Hara. More often, his glittering narrative is bedecked with the baubles of cheap fiction: rich people, raw sex, drugs, booze, and fame. Part of McInerney's problem lies in his narrator, a creepy arriviste who's self-conscious about his failings, but never to the point of actually repudiating his shallow self. Now a middle-aged lawyer at a ``white-shoe firm'' (as he says more often than necessary), Patrick Keane first met his ``legendary'' friend, Will Savage, in 1965, at a New England prep school where the two roomed together. The last in a line of debauched and dysfunctional southerners, Savage displays all the self-assured recklessness of a rich kid who couldn't care less about SATs or fitting in. Rather, since it's the '60s, he cultivates his outlaw pose, reading the Beats, practicing Buddhism, digging the blues, and cruising the black neighborhoods of his native Memphis. Savage takes the fall for one of Patrick's prep school indiscretions, and thereafter Patrick serves as liaison to Will's screwed-up, right-wing family, though he can't prevent Will from marrying his longtime sweetheart, Taleesha Johnson, the niece of a prominent bluesman. Unbowed, Savage becomes a fabulously wealthy and successful record producer. Patrick, meanwhile, with a Park Avenue apartment, a nice wife and two kids, becomes a partner in his law firm and struggles to make sense of his own conflicted sexuality. McInerney's facile reconstructing of history allows Patrick to discover a pre-Bellum Savage family memoir that explains their entire racial history, and, as the years hurtle by, McInerney continues to blunder through time, repeatedly taking pratfalls in passages of oily writing. Fiction for those who wouldn't be caught dead with Collins, Steel, et al. but want the same greasy splendor.
Library Journal Review
The author of the 1980s smash Bright Lights, Big City charts a turbulent friendship from the mid-1960s to the present day. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
