Volume 43, Number 9 · May 23, 1996
Babylon Re-Revisited
By Thomas R. Edwards
The Last of the Savages
by Jay McInerney
Knopf, 271 pp., $24.00
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, and as usual the literature business stood ready to oblige.
Review, 3206 words
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