Rich Man's Table

From the greatly 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 brought Luke to Christ (Father Richard Parker: "Luke had thrown himself into so many things--communistic thinking, Hinduism, drugs, patriotism, materialism . . . But he always burned right through it . . . I saw in Luke . . . a man haunted by God") . . . Luke's former lovers . . . Luke's musicians . . . Luke's drivers . . . Luke's myriad interviewers . . . Luke's drug couriers . . . Luke's friends, yes-men, enemies.

Billy becomes the chronicler of his father's life, and the story takes shape both as Billy's discovery of himself and as the biography of Luke Fairchild.

The Rich Man's Table brilliantly spans the decades between the early sixties, when Luke, then a scruffy folk singer, played for handouts in Greenwich Village nightclubs, and the late nineties, when the dreams of youth have faded in the wake of lost loves, dashed hopes, and the nightmarish distortions of fame. Scott Spencer brings alive the energy and the essence of that time for those who were there, as well as for those who wish they had been.

Scott Spencer is the author of six novels and has written for the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ, and The Nation. He has taught at Columbia University and the University of Iowa. He lives in New York with his two children.