Scott Spencer is a great writer, but 'Willing' is just a good book. This book has such promise, a guy flees a failing relationship plagued by deceit and infidelity by taking his uncle up on an offer for a once in a life time first class sex tour around the world. The lead character grapples with his feelings and emotions as he travels on this tour. At times its profound, and then it can turn almost maddening. The book gathers some great steam only to fail completely in the final act.

Spencer has one of the best endings I've read in his book "Men in Black", but here he has a deus ex machina event that just doesn't work and ultimately denigrates a fairly strong effort. In many ways Willing is an incomplete book with a whiplash ending. Spencer is better than this and so that's what makes reading this book all the more frustration. As I've said with other great writers and books that have missed their mark... What happened to the editor? The book was released by Harper Collins, not too shabby of a publisher, and yet no one saw that the gem of this book gets cracked by a truly awful ending? (

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gkleinman | Jul 2, 2008 |

Willing's narrator Avery Jankowsky, having just broken up with his unfaithful girlfriend yet still unable to afford to move out of the Manhattan apartment he shares with her, finds himself in the grip of a severe mid-life crisis. This and the promise of a significant book deal that will enable to him not only to move to a new place but also enjoy financial security for the first time in a long while prompt him to embark on an international sex tour offered to him by a well-meaning uncle. What follows is a penetrating and often amusing look into upscale sex tourism at the hands of a narrator who has always been a "good guy" but is at a loss as to whether he wants to continue in that path. In less capable hands, this could prove to be a particularly loathesome topic, but Spencer imbues his narrator with sharp wit and self-awareness and gives him ample time to muse over the immorality into which he has plunged himself. Somehow Spencer's account manages to deride sex tourism while at the same time cultivating readers' sympathies toward the cast of characters who have paid an ample amount of money to participate in the tour, picking up on the somewhat pathetic nature of the entire process. (

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yourotherleft | Apr 12, 2008 |

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Epigraph

"What did we care?" Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad

Dedication

To my mother

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So there I was, Avery Jankowsky, New York City, early twenty-first century, not terribly educated in light of all there was to know, but adequately taught in light of what I had to do.

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Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 006076015X, Hardcover)

Hailed as "the contemporary American master of the love story" (Publishers Weekly), bestselling author Scott Spencer takes us on a psychologically intense—and brilliantly funny—journey inside the world of international sex tourism.

Avery Jankowsky is a thirty-seven-year-old Manhattan writer scraping by on freelance assignments. Despite his lack of ambition, and very much to his own surprise, he has won the affections of Deirdre, a Columbia grad student many years his junior. But when Deirdre tells him that she has been having an affair, Avery's world is shattered.

Beside himself with jealousy and grief, Avery heads across town to meet his uncle Ezra for their monthly lunch date. Ezra senses his nephew's fragile emotional state and makes a startling proposition: Avery should use his tickets to an all-expenses-paid international sex tour. Sensing a white-hot book idea (and a chance to get back at Deirdre), Avery agrees to go as an undercover journalist.

As the tour bounces from one Nordic country to another, Avery and his fellow travelers—most of them wealthy and accomplished—descend ever deeper into a blinding world that is equal parts hilarity and nightmare, until Avery suddenly finds himself face-to-face with the one person he never expected to see.

A two-time National Book Award finalist, Spencer has already given us some of the most remarkable tales of love and passion in contemporary American fiction. Willing is at once a lighter and a darker performance, a startling tour de force that explores the limits of male restraint, the intoxications of privilege, the maddening dangers of freedom, and the knockdown, drag-out fight between our instincts and our better natures.

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:04 -0400)

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