THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, July 17, 1996 TAG: 9607170042
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY TIM WARREN
LENGTH: 89 lines
IN ``THE LAST of the Savages,'' Jay McInerney doesn't get away completely from writing about the bored and self-absorbed, but at least he attempts to widen his scope. This novel, his fourth, covers a lot of ground - the South, the burden of history on a region and a family, race relations, the blues - all interwoven into a plot of two men coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s.
If this sounds like perhaps too much to incorporate into 271 pages, you're right. McInerney has a lot of details and back-story to work into ``The Last of the Savages,'' and that means character development - never one of McInerney's strengths - is lacking.
``The Last of the Savages'' traces the relationship of Patrick Keane and Will Savage over a 30-year span. They meet at a New England prep school in 1965. Patrick, the narrator, is working-class, from the mill town of Taunton, Mass. A true naif, he scarcely knows what to make of the insouciant, well-bred young man from Memphis who becomes his roommate.
They have hardly met when Will starts declaiming on his passion, the blues. He tells Patrick solemnly:
``This is the purest art this damn country has produced, man. Listen up. It's like the distilled essence of suffering and the yearning to be free. That's why it could only have been produced by the descendants of slaves.''
Will also tells Patrick, ``We're all slaves, but we don't know it.'' That's one of the themes of ``The Last of the Savages'': how to make it in society without surrendering your ideals and your freedom. Conformity has its price, and Will is unwilling to pay it.
So, as Patrick slogs along a career path that includes Yale, Harvard Law School and partnership in a major New York law firm, Will is kicked out of prep school, never attends college, travels around the world constantly in search of spiritual enlightenment and, most important, becomes a legendary record producer.
He becomes a larger-than-life figure, ingesting vast quantities of drugs and liquor, cavorting with groupies, and helping make some of the most important music of his generation.
All the while, Will is struggling mightily, and mostly unsuccessfully, to exorcise his demons. As a member of the white ruling class of Memphis, he's aware that his position is tainted by a long history of racism - thus his desperate attempts to embrace blacks and black culture. He has a tortured relationship with his patrician father, Cordell, and feels responsible for the violent deaths of his two brothers. ``The Last of the Savages'' refers, then, to Will's desire to reject his family's ill-gained status and privilege.
All of this is a far cry from McInerney's earlier novels, such as ``Bright Lights, Big City'' and ``Brightness Falls,'' which were mostly about smug, pretentious Easterners. McInerney now lives part time in Tennessee, and being in the South clearly has opened some horizons. But ``The Last of the Savages'' shows he hasn't learned very much.
Anyone who has lived in the South for very long will undoubtedly cringe at McInerney's depictions of the region and its inhabitants. It's a very cartoonish world, quite Gothic and forbidding. And for a book supposedly sympathetic to black people, it tends to treat them dismissively. Except for the woman who becomes Will's wife, they're invariably in the background, and most are one-dimensional figures around whom Will can smoke dope and groove to the blues. It's never convincing when McInerney has black people opening up to Will; he seems like a typical white liberal who gushes over their music and whose view of blacks is so fawning as to be paternalistic.
McInerney has always been a keen observer of contemporary culture, and he has a great eye for details and nuance in his settings (fashion, the music being played, etc.). But his march-of-time approach only accentuates the shallowness of ``The Last of the Savages.''
There's a lot of glossing over, and some very awkward transitions, such as ``The leaves turned ruby and gold, then gathered themselves in fragrant heaps while I was filling out applications for college.'' (Did they stop gathering when he was done with the paperwork?) You can almost feel McInerney flipping the pages of the calendar as he urges the story along.
``The Last of the Savages'' shows that McInerney still doesn't write with much resonance and depth. At its worst, the novel descends into the cliched slickness of a made-for-TV movie. He is conscientious enough as a writer to want to stretch, but just wasn't up to the task of writing the dense, multi-layered novel he envisioned - particularly regarding such complex subjects as the South and racism. As an evident blues aficionado, he should know that he hasn't paid enough dues. MEMO: Tim Warren is a writer who lives in Silver Spring, Md. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
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BOOK REVIEW
``The Last of the Savages''
Author: Jay McInerney
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf. 271 pp.
Price: $24 by CNB