Jay McInerney Critical Essay | Critical Review by James Campbell

SOURCE: "A Slave to Success," in Times Literary Supplement, June 14, 1996, p. 24.

In the following review, Campbell offers tempered praise for McInerney's effort to address contemporary race relations in The Last of the Savages.

In 1962, at the height of the Civil Rights movement. James Baldwin published Another Country, a novel based on the premise that love conquers all, and involving every racial and sexual permutation then imaginable (in many minds, unimaginable). Three-and-a-half decades later, the contents of the pot having failed to melt, the best of the present crop of white writers seem to feel as uncomfortable with black characters as the worst of their parents' generation did with black neighbours. Race is regarded as Afro turf, and whites who stray on to it are seldom thanked for doing so.

Jay McInerney's attempt to raise the subject in The Last of the Savages displays this talented writer's...
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