SOURCE: "Riding a Ghost Train, Gatsby-Style," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 9, 1996, p. 10.

In the following review, Coleman offers praise for The Last of the Savages, but dismisses McInerney's aspiration to match F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

It is foolhardy for a novelist to go toe to toe with a beloved classic. Whether by accident or design, it's a risk Jay McInerney takes with his fifth novel. The Last of the Savages echoes with allusions to The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's tragic tale of a self-invented man whose dreams ultimately destroy him. In doing so, he has written a thoroughly engaging and funny novel that nevertheless suffers by comparison, as almost any novel would.

Both Savages and Gatsby have narrators who serve as conventional foils to passionate iconoclasts. In Gatsby, it is Nick Carraway who tells Jay Gatsby's haunting story. In Savages, it is Patrick...