Scott Spencer (1) (1945–)

“No one really expects you to get your life on firmer footing while you're on a sex tour.” — Scott Spencer, “Willing”

If there's one thing worse than being on a sex tour you don't really want to be on, it's meeting your mother along the way. And so we have the situation in Scott Spencer's 2008 novel “Willing.”

Avery Jankowsky (his fourth surname because he has had four fathers) is a frustrated freelance writer looking for a big idea to fatten his shrinking bank account. Then show more Deirdre, his girlfriend, reveals she has been unfaithful. So when his uncle offers him a spot, free of charge, on a sex tour featuring high-class European call girls, he views it as the gold mine he has been looking for, as well as perhaps a way to get back at Deirdre.

Off he goes with an assembly of wealthy men, trying to conduct interviews without anyone realizing that is what he is doing. Stops include Iceland, Norway and Latvia. The girls, while interesting, don't help him forget Deirdre. But why does he keep seeing his mother at every hotel?

This sounds like it should be a comic novel, and it certainly has comic elements. Deirdre is a student of Russian history, and she tells Avery she thought an affair with a Russian man might be useful research. And Spencer gives us phrases like "Scarlet A Bomb" and "I knew where the caged bird craps." Still this is serious stuff, and Spencer writes beautifully about the neediness of those who seem to have everything, about the boundlessness of a mother's love and about the power of grace.

It turns out meeting one's mother on a sex tour might not be such a bad thing after all, not if it puts one's life on firmer footing. show less

Paul is basically a good guy. Which is why, when he encounters a man abusing his dog in an otherwise deserted state park, he tries to stop it. A fight ensues, and in the scuffle, Paul accidentally kills the man. Then he does something that's probably not so good: he leaves the body there and tells no one what happened. But while it seems likely that he'll never be arrested for the crime, living with what he's done may be another matter.

I liked this a lot. It's very well-written, with show more believable characters and a nice sense of emotional realism. And while I'm not normally a fan of the head-hopping style of omniscient narration, I think Scott Spenser uses it to very good effect here. There are some interesting themes about love, about the gaining and losing of faith, and the human capacity for violence and remorse, but it's all very grounded in the characters, with the author never explicitly preaching his own point of view. And while it is very much a character-based novel, more about relationships and emotions and psychology than anything strongly plot-driven, it still somehow manages to have some of the feel of a good suspense novel. show less

“I have learned one of the lessons of loneliness, one of its shocking side effects, desire goes on and on, like an ocean without a shore.”

A beautifully written meditation on the dangers of wasting your life wishing and hoping for someone you can never have. Kip’s story captures the self-delusion we find ourselves intwined in as we continue to believe, despite everything, that a relationship might still be possible. Many of the book’s nuances hit very near the bone for me. Can’t show more stop thinking about it. show less

River Under the Road by Scott Spencer begins an uncomfortable brunch and, in the course of several parties over the following decades, tells the story of a relationship. Grace and Thaddeus meet in Chicago one summer, she's an aspiring artist with an alcoholic mother, he's an aspiring author with parents who love, but don't particularly like him. They both dream of joining a vibrant artistic community, but it doesn't take them long to discover that New York in the seventies is less urbane and show more cultured than they expected. Grace's careful pencil drawings are not the performance art of the zeitgeist, and Thaddeus begins to worry that maybe he's not capable of writing the literary masterpiece he dreams of writing.

Scott Spencer is such a solid writer. He knows what he's doing, how to build a story, how to write characters who are nuanced and breathe. He writes a little like John Cheever, with his ability to write so that the words never become more visible than the story and with his portrayals of people stuck in moments of ambiguity or quiet discomfort. This was a novel with an old-fashioned feel and while I never warmed to either Grace or Thaddeus, with their innate conservatism, I was always happy to get back to this one and stayed up late more than once with it. show less