THE MOUNTAINTOP
In the first days of April 1968, Lyndon Johnson had just announced he would not run for reelection in November; there were 525,000 American troops in Vietnam and the battle of Khe Sanh was raging; Robert F. Kennedy, brother of the assassinated president, had recently entered the race for the Democratic nomination; Martin Luther King Jr. was shuttling between his home in Atlanta and Memphis, where he was an advocate for striking sanitation workers; King had led a peaceful protest march in Memphis that turned into a police-fueled riot; a young black man had been shot dead by a white policeman; on April 4, King himself would be murdered as he stood on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel.
This is the background against which The Mountaintop is set. Its five young protagonists are Ben, who has quit a lucrative job to volunteer for the Kennedy campaign, and is sent to Memphis as an organizer; Prosper, who was Ben’s Princeton roommate, now works for a radio station in New York and is desperately trying to avoid being drafted into the military; Maddy, who lives with Ben and teaches at a bilingual primary school in East Harlem; Lydia, Maddy’s fellow teacher who’s moved from the Lower East Side barrio to move in with Alex — Ben and Prosper’s classmate, who is more interested in psychotropic drugs than in his work at Columbia film school.
Ben gets lessons on race and politics from his black, Harvard-educated organizing partner, and falls hard for the light-skinned daughter of prominent black Memphians. Prosper endeavors to keep his blood pressure high and his temper low as he takes his physical at the Federal Building in New Haven, dealing with a gung-ho army corporal, pining for Ben’s girlfriend, Maddy. Maddy in turn is puzzled that Ben has told her only that he’ll be in Memphis; she has no idea where he’s staying, what he’s up to, and eagerly accompanies Prosper to a party in the city. Alex disappears on one of his all-night druggy rambles, and Lydia wakes up to find him in the company of three seeming Puerto Rican thugs. She dissuades him from handing over his expensive film equipment, but it’s not as easy to convince his new “friends” from leaving without it. In the ensuing days Alex will buy an ounce of super-powerful marijuana and drive to Delaware to acquire a Walther PPK pistol. An ominous combination.
1968 had more than its share of sex, drugs, and violence, all of which — along with a strong sense of history — are well represented in The Mountaintop.
The Mountaintop is available in both paperback and Kindle formats at Amazon.com.
Peter Delacorte won the F. Scott Fitzgerald Prize for Creative Writing as an undergraduate at Princeton University. After a decade covering popular music, he wrote his first novel, Games of Chance, which was followed by Levantine and Hero of the Revolution. His fourth novel, Time on My Hands, was shortlisted for the U.K.’s prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award. He is currently at work on No Time to Lose, the sequel to Time on My Hands. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Bonnie, and a spaniel mix named Twiggy.
