DIM LIGHTS

By BRUCE HANDY

Jay McInerney could have spent the rest of his career rewriting Bright Lights, Big City, a well-observed comic novel that caught a generational updraft and became either The Catcher in the Rye of the '80s or the Trout Fishing in America of the '80s, depending on your estimation (I would come down somewhere in between). His subsequent books didn't stray far from the urban high life, but with his fifth novel McInerney aims to limber up and take on something more ambitious.

The Last of the Savages (Knopf; 271 pages; $24) spans the past three decades and is larded with big themes and echoes of big American writers: the strange romanticism of Fitzgerald's class envy; a Faulknerian obsession with slavery's enduring "curse" on the South; stoic, Hemingwayesque suffering amid sexual loss; and--novelists must have some consistency in their concerns--passages of Herculean drug abuse in the manner of Jay McInerney.

It's too bad the author rarely pushes beyond the most obvious implications of his overflowing subject matter. Still, this is a book of many pleasures, not the least of which is the credibly fraught bond between its two protagonists: Patrick Keane, a scholarship student at a New England prep school, and his roommate, the Afrophilic son of a rich and corrupt white Southern family, the Savages (hence the unfortunate title).

McInerney's acuteness as a social critic remains intact (a late '70s dinner party is said to have taken place "just before spaghetti became pasta"), as does his occasionally tart way with language. Impressive too is the quiet way in which Patrick, the narrator, finally comes to terms with his conflicting drives. There is a surprising modesty here at the end of this clamorous and overreaching book, a frank conservatism that is close to daring in a work of contemporary fiction.

--By Bruce Handy