Word: spencers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...