The Last of the Savages by Jay McInerney. The Last of the Savages from Amazon.
References are a natural way for writers to pay tribute to peers and predecessors.
Occasionally, however, a work comes along in which the motivation for literary cap-tipping seems less straightforward. Narrating the story is Patrick Keane, Savage's best friend and sometime confidant, a passive, self-effacing bystander to the chaos who nevertheless remains close enough to his subject to report from the insider's point of view, yet is just far enough outside the circle of corruption to avoid the mammon that ultimately leads to his friend's collapse. Many readers will recall roughly the same story line in King's Men . Those who do not can simply repeat the paragraph above, substitute the name Willie Stark for Will Savage, poor white southern taxpayers for poor black southern blues musicians, and Jack Burden for Patrick Keane, and come up with a pretty fair summation of that book's plot. But the parallels between Savages and King's Men do not flower at the surface only to wither in the subtext.