Outside the world of TV sitcoms, it would be hard to imagine two more unlikely prep-school roommates than Patrick Kearne and Will Savage, one a working-class student from a nearby New England mill town, the other a Memphis renegade with patricide in his DNA. They meet in 1967, at the beginning of ``that psychedelic decade,'' and remain close while Patrick goes on to become a corporate lawyer and Will a kingmaker in the music business with an ego the size of a military transport and a body overripe as the mature Marlon Brando's.

What they share is the need to remake themselves, a common link strong enough to carry them through uncommon times. Kearne wants to be the success his own appliance salesman father with his shiny polyester tie is not; Will fantasizes about killing his father who, according to accepted local legend, shot his own father dead. ``They ruled it accidental, but Cordell's daddy was a mean drunk.''

Will nearly succeeds. His younger brother, A.J., had been killed in a hunting accident the year before Will started prep school. Will blames himself because he was the one who was supposed to go hunting that day. Years later, after Will has established himself as a blues and soul entrepreneur and a Memphis gadfly, and not incidentally has married the black singer Taleesha Johnson, his older brother, L.B., is killed in a predawn chase while driving Will's car. Will blames himself for that death as well. What he didn't anticipate was that his daddy, consequently, would take off for London with L.B.'s flaming-baton twirler of a fiancee.

Like Christopher Ransom, the hero of McInerney's second novel Ransom, Will Savage is disgusted with his upper-class privilege and ashamed of his father. Like Ransom, Will goes to Japan seeking clarity, but while there he buys up all the flea market silk kimonos he can find and sells them at a huge profit to a buyer in San Francisco.

The American dream

Will and Patrick are different versions of the American dream. Will, with ``his pinwheel eyes and black velvet cape,'' is not only given to Baroque excess, he's also beyond irony. His belief in the messianic power of music, drugs and paranoia rarely yields, but finally, after lining his walls with charts implicating his father in the Martin Luther King assassination, he suffers a moment of insight. He, Will, is ``just another Big Massa on a different kind of plantation.''

There's enough male bonding in this novel to fill a football stadium, more than a hint of homoerotic attraction, lots of McInerney's trademark style and cleverness, his themes of excess and familial dependence. This time, however, the focus is not on the glittery surface, the recognition of posturing in the big city shadows that is McInerney's best-known terrain. And, absurdity being a movable feast, the author's zaniness never flags: When Patrick takes a train down from New Haven for a party, a bass player, upon learning Patrick is studying law, asks him, ``Let's say you throw something out of your car window. I mean, how can they say whether it's yours or not?''

Growing insight

McInerney is deft in tracking Patrick's growing insight as he observes Will's belligerent romanticism. Patrick is Nick Carraway to Will's Gatsby. And Will himself is a complex character dressed in caricature. He believes in breaking barriers and rightly perceives that music is the appropriate vehicle.

If this novel suffers from anything it is its own excess, including an unnecessary final twist. There is a subplot about Will giving Patrick a great-great aunt's diary of a pre-Civil War slave revolt and Patrick basing his senior thesis on it. One mirror too many. But, as Patrick remarks about his roommate at Yale, ``young men seldom talk among themselves about the things that matter the most. . . .'' The Last of the Savages is full of irreverent truths about the things that matter most to young men and to the people they become.

Betsy Willeford is a Miami writer.