SOURCE: "Land of the Also Rising Sun," in The New York Times Book Review, September 29, 1985, p. 42.

In the following review, Loewinsohn offers unfavorable assessment of Ransom.

Jay McInerncy is a serious, gifted artist. His first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, is a brilliant and moving work—unique, refreshing, imaginatively powerful and authentically conceived. Ransom, on the other hand, while dealing competently with some of the same themes—alienation, self-alienation and the need for context and continuity—rarely rises above the level of mere competence. It feels thoroughly conventional, thoroughly uninspired.

It is concerned with a group of young, rootless American expatriates in an exotic foreign land where one of them attempts to reconstruct his ravaged self in a corrupt and corrupting environment, and it reads like a transistorized version of The Sun Also Rises—that is, miniaturized, reduced. Hemingway set his action in Paris and Spain; Mr. McInerney...