The Last of the Savages

Jay McInerney

Always the Last to Know – As I started reading this engaging novel, I realized that Jay McInerney has become one of my favorite writers, an author I trust to spin a captivating tale, a wordsmith I relish and study. I also discovered that my appetite for McInerney books I’ve not yet read is equal to my love of re-reading F. Scott Fitzgerald. In part, I’m entranced by how their Irish-American outlook colors the stories they tell – American stories of tragedy and triumph, of social climbing, of tattered faith and romance. But it’s also the writing that attracts me to both: the poetry of their sentences. “The capacity for friendship is God’s way of apologizing for our families,” McInerney begins this novel of the unlikely bond between a southern rebel and a northern conformist. That’s a sentence worthy of the great Fitzgerald at the top of his game.