Scott Spencer has not yet written the Great American Novel, but the stunning opening of Endless Love (which puts the Brooke Shields film version to shame) is a fair contender for the Great American First Chapter. A study of obsessive lust, it belongs just one shelf down from Lolita. And Spencer's 1995 Men in Black, about a downtrodden serious novelist who pens a trashy bestseller about space aliens, is by most accounts even funnier than the 1997 sci-fi comedy of the same name. Now Spencer has written the Great American Novel About Bob Dylan. The Rich Man's Table calls Dylan Luke Fairchild, and it's narrated by his illegitimate son, Billy, obsessed with forcing Fairchild to acknowledge him. Now, the real Dylan's (legitimate) son is the bandleader of the Wallflowers, and his papa is clearly proud that both of them have hit albums (Bringing Down the Horse and Time Out of Mind, with tie-in paperbacks for both Bringing Down the Horse and Time Out of Mind).
Even so, Spencer's Luke Fairchild is a completely plausible, richly detailed portrait of the rock star Dylan might have been in a parallel world. "How did a shapeless Jewish kid from the Midwest become so famous, so beloved, so despised, so lonely, so pious, so drug-addicted, so vicious, so misunderstood, so overanalyzed?" wonders Billy, who proceeds to find out by interviewing everybody Luke ever knew. Young Luke (a "faintly girlish beauty") learns his trade from old blues singers and New York pinko folkies, spurns them for decadent rock, sings about an unjustly accused man who embarrassingly turns out to have been justly accused of murder, and ages badly. ("The mockery was gone ... his drugged-out eyes were no more expressive than olives.") Luke is high and mighty about being down-home and unpretentious, like Dylan who, when he was offered fine wine by the Beatles, demanded cheap wine instead (and guzzled the fine wine while waiting for the cheap to arrive by expensive courier).
So close is Luke to Dylan that much of Spencer's novel constitutes a clever criticism of Dylan's actual pretensions and achievements. Unlike the deranged Romeo who narrates Endless Love, Billy makes the object of his obsessive affections come to life as a character. To verify Luke's similarity to the real singer, check out Bob Dylan's only book, Tarantula.
Some readers will find the roman a clef aspect of The Rich Man's Table irritating, distracting. The book's defenders will have to excuse a plot as reedy as Luke's (and Bob's) singing voice. And Luke's song lyrics, while often good pastiche, are too obviously connected to the events in his life to be fully, incomprehensibly Dylanesque.
Even so, you've got to grant Spencer's emotional perfect pitch, especially when he's describing self-deception and self-loathing. He has a poet's eye and a wicked gift for metaphor. And while he takes his characters seriously, he is a merciless satirist of celebrity culture: One doctor Billy interviews tells him, "Luke didn't have much of a capacity for pain but then added, with an inside dopester's smirk, that he did, however, have a large capacity for painkillers." We will probably never have a real insider's portrait of Bob Dylan. But who needs it? The reality can't match Scott Spencer's imagination. --Tim Appelo
From Library Journal
The narrator of a coming-of-age novel is typically an awkward adolescent caught on the cusp of adulthood, but Spencer provides a twist. Billy Rothschild, the illegitimate offspring of a rock'n'roll star and an exceptionally beautiful woman, is a decade removed from his teenaged years, but he has still not made the emotional transition to maturity. His coming of age has been held obsessively in limbo by an unresolved need to connect with his famous father. Billy lives his life around the edges of his father's career, interviewing old friends and acquaintances and seeking release in chronicling his search for recognition. A tragic accident forces Billy's long-awaited reunion and release. Fans of Spencer's Men in Black (LJ 4/15/95) will recognize the self-absorbed voices and critical self-reflections that mark his characters. For larger public libraries.?Jan Blodgett, Davidson Coll., NC
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Billy Rothschild is tracking his father, Luke Fairchild, who abandoned his mother, Esther, when she got pregnant. Unfortunately, Luke, cocooned by his fame as a legendary singer, denies being Billy's father. (Luke is modeled on Bob Dylan, whose real-life son recently gained fame fronting the successful rock band The Wallflowers.) Billy's quest takes the form of an investigative biography, containing anecdotes that evoke the music industry from the 1960s through the 1990s. His mother was the darling of Greenwich Village in the early 1960s when she was Luke's lover, and Billy grows up surrounded by bohemian artists for whom she remains a nostalgic reminder. Billy's book rambles through odd run-ins with Luke and interviews with the famous and forgotten, building to the long-anticipated showdown with his dad, though it comes at Esther's expense. Although some Generation Xers may take exception to the fact that Billy seeks definition through his baby boomer father, the well-paced and often tongue-in-cheek story should otherwise delight both generations. Kevin Grandfield
From Kirkus Reviews
``All I wanted was a father,'' Billy Rothschild explains, looking back at his fatherless childhood. At the heart of Spencer's (Men in Black, 1995, etc.) dense, rueful, startling new novel is a young man's long search to somehow make contact with his long absent parent. Billy's mother Esther reluctantly tells him, when he's nine years old, that his absent father is in fact Luke Fairchild, the dominant figure on the folk-rock scene in the 1960s and '70s and a man now obscured by many layers of legends. But knowing who his father is, Billy gradually discovers, isn't enough. He needs to know who this manwho seems, at the same time, both an entirely public and deeply private figurereally is and why he seems to have had so little interest in his son. The book is presented as the grown-up Billy's record of this long pursuit, and it covers, with great dexterity, a lot of territory. It shares, with many of Spencer's other novels (Secret Anniversaries, 1990, etc.) a protagonist undertaking an anguished search for the truth, and a fascination with the upheavals and utopian possibilities of the '60s. Billy begins to research his father's life, to track down anyone who has known him and can tell him something authentic about the man. He interviews musicians, former lovers, even a priest who had counseled him. Out of this welter of conflicting information, Billy begins to assemble a portrait of a sad, ambitious, deeply conflicted man. And eventually, of course, Billy's search leads him to an encounter with his father, and to a deeply ironic reunion between his parents. The portrait of Luke remains somewhat hazy, but the passion of Billy's search, and the yearning that drives it, as well as the pain of lost possibilities he discovers in Luke and Esther's lives, are all rendered with vigor and clarity. A mournful, moving work. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
“A tale of over-the-top intensity that enthralls to the end.” —People“Told with wit [and] assurance.” —The New Yorker“A fabulous book that catches the spirit of its time.” —Stephen King
From the Inside Flap
atly admired author of Men in Black, Waking the Dead, and Endless Love, a novel about a legendary singer who was the god of music to the young of the 1960s and 1970s, as seen through the eyes of his illegitimate son.
The narrator is Billy Rothschild, who grows up obsessively searching for the father he never knew. He's nine when he discovers his father is Luke Fairchild, the most idolized and imitated folk-rock singer of his time, embraced as the truth-telling voice of his generation. Later Billy discovers that Esther (his mother) and Luke were the emblematic couple; a picture of them wrapped in each other's arms, walking down a rainy New York City street, graced the cover of Luke's most famous early album. Songs about Esther abound in the Fairchild songbook.
Unacknowledged by Luke, tormented by the omnipresence of the Luke Fairchild legend, Billy seeks out everyone and anyone who can give him information: the priest who almost
From the Back Cover
In praise of Scott Spencer
Men in Black
"Spencer's true métier is the fervent exploration of
the erotic and the Oedipal . . . It's a territory that he
covers with a lyrical intensity and a taste for the queasy particulars of lust and resentment."
--Hal Espen, The New Yorker
Secret Anniversaries
"It has a vivid, continual force . . . It bears the hallmarks
of his previous work yet breaks additional ground . . .
His characters are passionate, committed . . . There is
wit here and real rage. The historical dimensions ring absolutely true."
--Nicholas Delbanco, Chicago Tribune
Waking the Dead
"A terrific novel . . . It's powerful, complex, fascinating,
passionate . . . and occasionally a scene comes across as so elegantly rounded and complete I admit to gasping from sheer pleasure."
--Fay Weldon, New York Times Book Review
Endless Love
"Scott Spencer is a magnificent writer, and Endless Love
is his finest novel."
--Anne Tyler, The New Republic
About the Author
Scott Spencer (b. 1945) is the critically acclaimed, bestselling author of ten novels, including Endless Love and A Ship Made of Paper, both of which have been nominated for the National Book Award. Two of his books, Endless Love and Waking the Dead, have been adapted into films. He has taught at Columbia University, the University of Iowa, and Williams College and is a regular contributor to Rolling Stone. Spencer lives in upstate New York.
