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You couldn't help imagining Rob at this party, a little nervous, probably a little tight, embarrassed at the goofy gimmicks the Doubleday people foisted on the crowd -- first a painful reading and then a spelling bee ("That's rrright!" Jennings' Canadian tenor boomed through the Whitney's lobby when someone got "lepidopterist" on the first try) -- but proud, too. After all, his first and only novel, "Lightning on the Sun," doesn't need any gimmicks to sell it. It's the real thing -- intense, poetic, infinitely sad and compelling. Even where the book, a thriller set mostly in Southeast Asia, stumbles it's still interesting, much like Rob's brilliant and inexplicably overlooked book of short stories, "Pure Slaughter Value," published in 1997.

Also Today "Lightning on the Sun" An excerpt from Robert Bingham's final work. By Robert Bingham

"I bumped into Bingham a lot, at book parties, you know, and I always thought he was kind of annoying, like one of those trust-fund kids who think they own the world," a young novelist at the Doubleday party said to me. Well, yeah. Rob was the scion of a mythic Southern newspaper family and had a mind-bogglingly huge trust fund -- granted, more mind-boggling in the days before dot.com bazillionaires roamed the Earth, but still, he had a lot of money. Plus his blood was about as blue as it gets in America; he was overprivileged and then some. But he was also blessed, or cursed, depending on how you look at it, with unusually acute insight, the kind of intense psychological sensitivity that makes people like Oedipus poke their own eyes out. He saw into the people around him and most of all deep into his own soul, and wrote it down as best as he could.

Rob also understood that having all that money did make him different -- and in many ways an unsympathetic, threatening person to almost everyone he met. The stench of filthy lucre permeated his writing, his humor, his insights into his characters, politics, literature and the complex and fragile emotional webs that friends and lovers weave around one another. There wasn't a relationship Rob wrote about in his short stories or in "Lightning on the Sun" that wasn't profoundly affected by money. Much like a Marxist revolutionary, Rob reckoned that very few human interactions were unscathed by the power of capital.

Rob chose to use people's complex and often overwhelming emotional reactions to great wealth as material for his art. And as tempting as it is to make the comparison, Rob's writing was not Fitzgeraldian in style or content. There is no room for lightness or hope, charm or melancholy, in Rob's view of money. Money and the desire for it loom threateningly over his characters, propelling them into physical and moral danger, relentlessly exposing them in all their vainglory and emotional fragility. The idea that money leads to death (both literal and emotional) is most explicit in "Lightning on the Sun" and in a brilliantly subtle short story, "The Other Family," that Rob first published in the New Yorker when he was only 26. But even in his other stories, where money is not an overt presence, there is a pervasive despair, sometimes broken by humor or farce, that characters who want for nothing materially are unable to be happy.

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