The Mountaintop

The Mountaintop is Peter Delacorte's fifth novel. Its predecessor, Time on My Hands, was shortlisted for the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award. The Mountaintop takes place primarily during the first four days of April, 1968, a period that begins with LBJ's announcement not to seek reelection and ends with Martin Luther King's assassination. Those events loom in the background, as do the Vietnam War and the schism in the Civil Rights Movement. The lives of the book's five young narrators, meanwhile, intersect and collide in ways that reflect the tumult, the excitement, and the tragedy of the time. A charismatic, Kennedyesque young achiever travels to Memphis for the nascent RFK presidential campaign, leaving his live-in girlfriend in Manhattan as he romances a beautiful college girl, who is patrician, ambitious, and black. A Columbia film student cuts classes in favor of psychedelic drugs, meets up with some larcenous Puerto Ricans, steals a car, and inadvertently commits a murder. A commentator at a leading-edge FM rock station takes time off from work for his draft physical, which he hopes to fail with chemical assistance, but a run-in with a malevolent non-com puts him on the fast track to Vietnam. Two young women, co-workers at a bilingual kindergarten in East Harlem, deal in their respective ways with the sexual politics of the time. Everything comes to a head on April 4, in Memphis and New York, in black and white, when the world is suddenly changed by an assassin's bullet at the Lorraine Motel.


Genre: Historical