SOURCE: "Babylon Re-Revisited," in The New York Review of Books, May 23, 1996, pp. 28-9.

In the following review, Edwards discusses Bright Lights, Big City, Ransom, and Story of My Life, and finds fault with McInerney's "bad writing" and lack of social and historical understanding in The Last of the Savages.

The 1980s in America were not unlike the 1920s, as almost everyone noticed. Costly foreign military adventures had wound down, postwar slumps had turned to booms, friends of business in both parties had power in Washington, the demand for illegal substances was enriching the criminal classes even as the rewards of high finance were making criminals of certain of the rich. And the young, it seemed, were running wild to the corrupting beat of music their elders couldn't see the point of. In both decades the age demanded a new literature commensurate with its power to excite and offend...