Oh No, Is It Him, Babe?

By John Skow

Who or what owns a public life? Surely not, in an age of celebrity babble, the public person who lives it. And not some over-delicate concept of historical truth. Gosh, no; didn't Shakespeare write docudrama about all those Henrys and Richards? He didn't? Well, close enough. And if we hate ourselves a little for loving our public legends too much, shouldn't we be able to get back at them by faking a few saintly relics?

A distinctly sleazy case in point is The Rich Man's Table (Knopf; 273 pages; $23), an expertly written novel by Scott Spencer, author of Endless Love, that rips off the life of Bob Dylan. Most readers will recall that Dylan was a scraggly haired harmonica player with an edgy voice and an edgy mind, a Jewish kid from Minnesota who changed his name from, let's see, Zimmerman? And later converted to Christianity for a few years. The character who dominates Spencer's novel was born Stuart Kramer, transformed himself as "Luke Fairchild," and came from "the Midwest," not specifically from Minnesota. Otherwise, the fit is exact.

And so what, except that the author has somewhat lazily not bothered to invent his own central figure? But the burden of the novel is that Luke Fairchild is a monster of charm and talent, adulated for the purity of his counterculture protest. And, as Spencer tells it, he abandons his pregnant girlfriend Esther Rothschild when he hits the big time, and then meanly refuses to acknowledge the resulting child Billy as his own, or to peel off any loot for child support. The story is told by Billy, who, as a teenager and then as an adult, skulks about the edges of Luke's fame, hoping forlornly for a smile from Dad.

Is there a real-life counterpart for the lovely, open-hearted Esther, pictured arm-in-arm with Luke on that early album cover? Does the self-pitying, rather irritating Billy really exist? Don't know, don't care, though if Esther and Billy are pure invention, what is the point of the Dylan caricature? These are questions that readers will ask, and try to answer. But they get in the way of the novel, which, of course, has done a thorough job of getting in its own way.

With his own hat size and voice print instead of Dylan's, Luke could have been a memorable main character-as-messiah, for whom genius, as Esther tells Billy, is its own excuse. As things are, the author cobbles up convincing song lyrics and catches the feel of things at the fringes of a big concert tour.

A star has people. He does not uncap a beer or roll his own joint or bother to seduce. His followers are driven by desperate hunger. In the novel's best scene, one of its last, Esther has been terribly hurt in a car crash. Luke appears and orders an ambulance, and they rush into Manhattan toward a hospital. But someone, probably the ambulance driver, has phoned a radio station. As the news gets out, cars fall in behind the ambulance, then ahead. Progress slows, then stops. Luke steps out, climbs on the ambulance, shouts for a clear path. "One song!" yells a fan. "Oh, pleeeeease!"

That's great. What isn't is an "acknowledgement," in which the author thanks "Bob Dylan, whose records kept me company through the thousands of hours..."

--By John Skow