Quotes of the Day
That's a photograph of a waterfall on the dust jacket of A Ship Made of Paper (Ecco; 352 pages), Scott Spencer's very fine new novel about wild love. But don't imagine it's there because his reckless lovers — one white, one black — find a happy ending at Niagara Falls. This is a book about love as a torrent, a force of nature that overwhelms families, harrows lives and lays waste to whole towns as it thunders through. Love may be our only hope, but when you put this book down — not an easy thing to do — you may wonder how civilization survives it.
Spencer has been along this road before, of course. Endless Love, his megaselling 1979 novel, was about a teenager led by crazy passion to burn down his girlfriend's house and later bring on the death of her father. (Don't blame him for the Brooke Shields movie.) For A Ship Made of Paper, his eighth novel, Spencer worked with different characters but similar desperations. Daniel is a New York City lawyer who flees back to Leyden, his childhood home on the Hudson River north of the city. It's a place on the literary map somewhere between Cheeverville and Updike Corners, where adultery is in the air like chimney smoke. Daniel brings with him his girlfriend Kate, a writer who has acid intelligence, a 4-year-old daughter whom Daniel adores and an accelerating problem with drink. Kate is still sober enough to realize that her boyfriend has been coldcocked by love for Iris, a genial, married grad student and mother. For good measure, Iris is African American, which means that once she and Daniel are in full swing, they will be not just treacherous mates but also load bearers of the burdens of history. Daniel imagines he's ready for that. "Love, he thinks, will bring history to its knees," Spencer writes.
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What love does is bring lovers to their knees, especially the ones additionally weighed down by a world where some black teens are on a local crime spree and the trial of O.J. Simpson is on every TV. What Daniel and Iris now stand to lose are the lives they have constructed to protect themselves from that world. Daniel and Kate have "a levelheaded alliance." She thinks of them as "Swiss bankers of the heart." But after three years in placid Leyden, she has a full inventory of wifely complaints. ("His smile can grate on her as if it were a cough.") And Daniel wants the rapture he finds with Iris. "He is like a man who suddenly discovers he can sing," Spencer tells us, "who one day opens his mouth in the shower and music bursts out of him, each note dipped in gold."
Iris, meanwhile, is married to Hampton, a fastidious African-American investment banker and a superb provider but one who is ever alert to racial slights, real or imagined, and who looks down his nose a bit at Iris, a bookish idler who can't even settle on a topic for her thesis. She surrenders to adultery in part because Daniel's love promises a refuge from judgments, expectations, even the workaday struggle to be black in a white town. Daniel and Iris are given to reckless sex — in his office, at her house when her husband is away but her 4-year-old son is not — that is made more irresistible by the fact that neither of them has made love with a member of the other's race. He's stupefied by her body; she's fascinated by his. After their first coupling, she looks it over with a flashlight while he's sleeping.
For all its considerable pain, in places Spencer's book is an improbable comedy. (Daniel's parents are remote Wasps who drop by one day to tell him they are leaving all their money to a local raptor-preservation society.) And in the unraveling fabric of his life, Daniel's blindness to his own predicaments is a lightly stitched comic thread. He's an intelligent man, but in matters of the heart, he has a muscular stupidity that gives him the strength to go on.
Even after he has dynamited his life, he can't resist the temptation to bounce the rubble, which leads to an unbearable episode that mixes a loaded gun and young children left without adult supervision. But at the mercy of their longings, Spencer's adults are unsupervised too. It falls to Kate to voice the suspicion that love may be "the firings of the foulest, most primitive part of the back brain." It falls to us to look on in wonder at the damage done.
Spencer writes the way Daniel loves — wholeheartedly, with a superabundance of energy. If there's a fulsome side to his gift — he doesn't hesitate to produce a line like "He wants to hold her in the moonlight"--it's a small price to pay for the complicated pleasures of a book in which love not only conquers all but also imposes victor's terms. Spencer is like that waterfall on the cover. He may produce a bit of gush, but in what he does there is a power of the kind that spins turbines.
- Richard Lacayo