Customer Reviews

The Rich Man's Table

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Scott Spencer is one of my favorite writers. I put him right up there with Graham Greene, Grace Paley, Ralph Elllison, and F.Scott Fitzgerald. The Rich Man's Table has gotten a lot of attention because of the Bob Dylan connection, but this novel works on SO many levels. It's a story about fathers and sons, fame, love lost and found, the demise of The Left, and what it feels like to be alive in America at the end of the century. Like Spencer's other novels, it bears repeated readings. You laugh, you cry, you care.

I don't know why Scott Spencer is not more widely acclaimed. His writing manages to be incredibly well crafted, beautiful, funny, witty, poingnant, and ironic all at the same time. This is the 4th book of Spencer's that I have read and his writing always manages to touch me emotinally and engage my intellect. Some sentences just make me sit back and say..."this is remarkable writing...". Dylan fans are certain to get a kick out of this book.

What a beautiful novel. I read this right after MEN IN BLACK, also a great Spencer book. I must admit I'm not much of a Dylan fan, but this book makes its own sense, with or without Bob. It's a wrenching look at parents and children, and at the lonely frightening maddening world of a man who gets what he wants. It's like the Midas touch, but real. I'll never forget this one.

I got this book for my birthday (because I'm a Dylan fan) and I totally liked it. It held my interest all the way --every page was either good or great. It's not really about Dylan but it real made me understand what it feels like to have so many people riding your coat tails. Scott Spencer is the man and I'm going to read all his books this semester.

I read this novel because I've been enjoying Bob Dylan's music for over 25 years. But I found myself admiring Scott Spencer's ability with words regardless of the Dylan connection. The book stands on its own as novel and has made me want to read more of this author.

Years later, you remember the power and steam of Spencer's novels, but you might forget how easy he is to read. He knows obsession (Endless Love) and he knows about the strange ways love binds people into families (Waking the Dead) and his writing is heartbreakingly good. I picked up The Rich Man's Table last night and finished it this morning, astonished at how I was taken in and moved by this story of a young man (Billy) and his pursuit of a father. Having read some reviews, I was a little sceptical about the parallel between the father character (Luke) and the actual Bob Dylan. I mean, to some point, what the heck is Bob Dylan doing in the fiction section? But after all, whether his father were modeled on Dylan, Guthrie, or Mick Jagger, the story is about Billy's quest, his pain, his ultimate reconciliation with his situation. This goes on my year's best list.

I like Bob Dylan, and I like the premise of this book; it's fun to read about places like P.S. 41 in Manhattan if one grew up there. This tale of the quest for the absent father has some good writing in it, but it is no better or worse than a dozen other "literary" novels. The prose is good, but not innovative or especially perspicacious concerning the measure of the human heart. But then who am I to judge. I'm just articulating my views in this silly forum, while Scott Spencer has made tons of money with "Endless Love" and other work. More power to him.

I think Scott Spencer has yet to write his best work, but his potential moves closer with every new volume. His prose encourages you to enter into his world, a world of his own rules and morals and standards, which in turn echo your own unspoken core. His work is rapture, on the edge of sanity.

The beauty and power of Spencer's writing will suck you in and pull you under. So good, so moving, so perfect -- the only fiction I've ever read that is worthy of Dylan.

I read The Rich Man's Table by Scott Spencer with more than keen interest. Employing the fictional vehicle of a bastard son in search of his father, Mr. Spencer has written an imaginative novel obviously inspired by the Folk-Rock legend, Bob Dylan. The raw outlines of biographical event in Bob Dylan's career direct the presentation of his character, Luke Fairchild. Anyone who has ever wanted to have a sense of "who" Bob Dylan is will find more insight in The Rich Man's Table than in any biography of Bob Dylan I have ever read. But there is a larger venue here than imaginative insight into the person of Bob Dylan, this is also a novel about the character of genius and the hysteria of celebrity.

I think there is a misguided popular notion that the dynamically enabled and insightfully directed character of genius is virtually clairvoyant, nearly omniscient. The real brilliance of Mr. Spencer's novel is in its revelation of genius as something that quite simply is; that is, a force that is large, impressive, and dynamically persuasive but one that moves and forever alters the world more incidentally than knowingly. As Mr. Spencer writes: I was now one of those people who believed in the sympathetic magic of the well-meaning sentiment. And why not? What else do we have? The clenched fist eventually becomes crossed fingers. (Quality Paperback, p. 191)

Scott Spencer also paints a portrait of celebrity that is wonderfully experiential. The clamoring presence of lost souls and sycophants around Luke Fairchild makes the absurdity of such shameless adoration markedly visible. The oddity of celebrity becomes dramatically apparent and helps inform the richness of the novel.

However, the pleasure of the novel is spoiled as it nears its conclusion. It loses its impressiveness when it turns to the keenly improbable to realize its completion. The last several chapters reek of contrivance ruining the wonderful believability of the chapters preceding them. It's not that events could not have happened as they do, it's that they are highly unlikely. A national icon of far reaching resources would indeed have found a more capable means of handling a medical emergency than the plot affords. What was wonderfully alive becomes fancifully artificial. It is a shame, before its clumsy, concluding chapters, The Rich Man's Table was an accomplished, animated work.