The ballad of habit and accident: A novel

The wild and melancholy wit of The Ginger Man twenty-five years ago setthe stage for Rock Brynner's hilarious, self-destructive odyssey through mind games, metaphysics and music of his own generation. The son of Yul Brynner, Rock chronicles his ribald search for self-esteem in theshadow of his father's stardom. Like Brooke Hayward, he is a study inyouthful anxiety; but the hero of Rock Brynner's novel has a Rabelaisian madness all his own.Th pursuit of literature and philosophyleads him from Yale to Trinity College, Dublin, where he lives ahaphazard existence of total intoxication - "Rock lived between habitand accident, between a bottle and a banana peel." In Paris he supportshimself, barely, writing the highly charged erotic fantasy included inThe Ballad. Aided by his father's celebrity, and loathing himself forusing it, Rock becomes the world-acclaimed star of Opium, a one-man show on Broadway; then, joining the anthems of the sixties, he istransformed into Red-hat, the vagabond clown who walks halfway aroundthe world with the youthful dropouts along the subterranean trails. From ashrams in India to gypsy festivals in Europe, Rock hides himself in aminstrel's anonymity, and becomes a balladeer, a bottle-cutter, and even a body guard to Muhammad Ali. When his personal is strippedaway by an executive nymph, he determines to kill himself on an epictranscontinental binge to end all binges. But half a million dollarslater, he is still alive, reduced to a bum on the curb with acharge-card machine, "the only beggar in London who accepted AmericanExpress." When his grief has burned away his madness, and thecamaraderie of of rebellion has collapsed like the Beatles, the wanderer chooses the path of courageous confrontation with sanity andredemption. The Ballad of Habit and Accident is a novel about an era of harmony and chaos, and a farcical, enigmatic figure who lays his life on the line to experience it all - and survives. It is a fabulousfestival of outrageous characters, stars and street folk alike.