Riding a Ghost Train, Gatsby-Style : FICTION : THE LAST OF THE SAVAGES,<i> By Jay McInerney (Alfred A. Knopf: $24; 271 pp.)</i>

It is foolhardy for a novelist to go toe to toe with a beloved classic. Whether by accident or design, it’s a risk Jay McInerney takes with his fifth novel. “The Last of the Savages” echoes with allusions to “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tragic tale of a self-invented man whose dreams ultimately destroy him. In doing so, he has written a thoroughly engaging and funny novel that nevertheless suffers by comparison, as almost any novel would.

Both “Savages” and “Gatsby” have narrators who serve as conventional foils to passionate iconoclasts. In “Gatsby,” it is Nick Carraway who tells Jay Gatsby’s haunting story. In “Savages,” it is Patrick Keane who recalls his friendship with his wealthy and privileged Gatsby-like friend, Will Savage.

A Southern aristocrat, Savage rooms with Keane, a scholarship student from a New England mill town, at prep school. Savage, in a self-sacrificial gesture vaguely reminiscent of Gatsby, protects his less-privileged friend, taking the blame for having a girl in their room--grounds for automatic expulsion.

Savage never returns to school and goes on to become a legendary record producer. Meanwhile, Keane toils through the Ivy League and eventually ascends into a partnership at a prestigious New York law firm. Through the years, the two friends stay in touch, with Keane coming to the rescue of his still-wealthy but self-destructive friend, who falls into, and finally out of, drug addiction.

At the age of 47, more or less happily married and living in a large Park Avenue apartment, Keane looks back at the course and meaning of his and Savage’s lives. It is this reverie that forms the narrative of “Savages.”

After spending part of several years in Tennessee, McInerney, with this book, is taking on an enduring Southern theme: the past in the present. There is a sense throughout “Savages” of the past being, as Savage says, “always with us. Right alongside us, like a ghost train.”

The presence of the past in the present is manifested in Savage’s inability to forgive himself for being indirectly involved in an accident that killed his younger brother and in his hatred of his family, which owned a plantation in Mississippi prior to the Civil War.

In particular, he rebels against his father, who is bent on maintaining white racial dominance in the South. Keane is drawn into this hatred when he uses Savage’s family history in a Yale thesis about a slave uprising on the Savage plantation in which an antebellum Savage son who sympathizes with the slaves rebels against his father.

With much humor, a keen ear for authentic dialogue and vivid characters, “Savages” evokes the atmosphere of the contemporary South, from black juke joints to white plantations. In one fine paragraph, it captures the essence of Savage’s home town: “Memphis possesses a jagged vitality that seems more western than Southern, as if its inhabitants have never been told that the frontier has moved on and, finally, disappeared. Although physically situated in Tennessee, it is the spiritual capital of Mississippi, the metropolis to which planters sent their wives for finery and their sons for dissipation; and to which the sons and daughters of their slaves migrated to escape the brutal drudgery of the cotton fields. The city was once abandoned to fever, and a riverine funk still hangs over the housing projects of the South Side as well as the mansions to the east.”

Besides the rich-man, poor-man theme to “Savages” and “Gatsby,” there is another similarity between the two books. In each, the narrators are Yale graduates. Moreover, Fitzgerald’s Carraway and McInerney’s Keane seem to have been shaped in part by what Keane calls “the darkest enigma of my being”--a sexual ambiguity that results in Keane having a fleeting sexual encounter with a man. Fitzgerald seems to suggest a similar ambivalence on the part of Carraway, who dates a tomboy professional golfer, never succeeds in a relationship with a woman, complains of a thinning list of single men as he grows older and evasively describes a drunken encounter with a “pale feminine” art photographer “clad in his underwear.”

Ever since “Bright Lights, Big City” established McInerney as a contender for a great American novelist, his trademark punch has been clever similes. “Savages” is peppered with these literary one-liners.

In one, Keane and Savage, still in prep school, sit at opposite ends of a long table in Savage’s cavernous dining room, giving a New Year’s Eve toast to the portraits of Savage’s ancestors on the walls, who are “glowering as if they had anticipated this long afterlife of staring at the living.”

McInerney is best at such small moments, some of which are tender as well as wryly humorous. In his first years at the law firm in New York, Keane realizes just how much the city has hardened him when meeting his mother’s bus. He rudely dismisses a street person and is made suddenly to see the beggar through his mother’s eyes: “a wizened little man with the face of a bewildered child, clearly retarded and now scared, clutching to his chest a showing bag overflowing with rags and scraps of paper. . . . I saw that she was ashamed of me. She was wondering how she could have raised a son who could respond so heartlessly and brutally to one of God’s needy creatures.”

But in the end, as the Gatsby of this novel, Will Savage is a disappointing hero. He sets out to free the slaves--both the oppressed blacks of the South and all Americans bonded to the status quo--by the promotion of blues and rock music and by his patronage of radical causes.

But he ends up midlife in Malibu, bloated and unable to father a child from years of high-octane substance abuse. He is left espousing a dubious Timothy Leary-like message of how computers are “going to free us all from the web of corporate power.”

Fitzgerald closes “Gatsby” with this famous existential image: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Some 70 years later, McInerney gives his characters his own cosmic epiphany. It’s not a bad moment, but few could match Fitzgerald’s for its simplicity, sadness and beauty.