On the fringe: a chapter about music

We go on a long road trip with Pat Bender, a failed 45ish musician whose act involves a music-comic schtick in which he comments on his own songs in a self-deprecatory and quirky manner - the narrator notes he's been likened to Spalding Gray. Enticed by a 20ish Irish guy, Joe, he met in a Portland bar, he goes to the UK to perform in the Edinburgh fringe festival - and we get, Jes Walters's novel Beautiful Ruins a rather peripatetic chapter - quite a challenge for Walters, who is pressed to write a musico-comic patter for Pat, which doesn't always sound all that funny - maybe it's not supposed to? but still - in which Pat finds a bit of a following and then loses it - and loses his manager, ends up completely down and out, and finally calls home to his mom in Idaho, from whom he's somewhat estranged, to ask for help - his ex-girlfriend and subject of his best-known song, Lydia, answers (she's caring for mom who is ill w/ ca.) and puts him off - no connection. Of course there is a huge connection to the ever-sprawling plot of this novel: his mom is the beautiful actress, Dee, who stayed at Pasquale's hotel back in 1962 and whose story we follow in the alternate chapters - novel oscillates between present and '62 - whom Pasquale is searching for, w help from onetime rival, the famous director Michael Deane - apparently Pat's father - though he didn't even know that till Pasq. just revealed. They have hired detectives to track down Dee - but not clear how they will find her or more important how this discovery will effect each of the characters: will Pasquale still love her after all the ravages of the years? What has happened in Pasquale's life over this span? Will Deane in some way make good for abandoning her with child? We know she has been an amateur actress in local theater troupes, but we know nothing else about her. Where did the surname Bender come from? Pat thinks his father died when he was 4 - is that just a story, or was there a man involved in raising him early on? I'll go out on a limb here and say there will be a lot more plot and subplot complications before this one wraps.