A Ship Made Of Paper: A Novel [Hardcover]

Spencer's latest novel should cement his reputation as the contemporary American master of the love story. Daniel Emerson is a New York City lawyer who has returned to his hometown of Leyden, N.Y., a picturesque Hudson Valley village, with his girlfriend Kate, a novelist, and her daughter, Ruby. Kate drinks and obsesses about the O.J. Simpson trial instead of writing fiction. Daniel finds himself falling in love with Iris Davenport, an African-American grad student at the local university. Iris is married to Hampton Welles, an investment adviser. The book records Iris and Daniel's affair from both perspectives and poses the question, is their fleeting happiness really worth so much ruin? For ruin there is a-plenty: Daniel thoroughly humiliates Kate, destroys his financial status, becomes a subject of gossip in the village and inadvertently mauls Hampton in an accident with a roman candle, making it almost impossible for Iris to leave him. Spencer is an unerring writer. He describes the two couples at a local concert: "From time to time, Kate must glance at Daniel. His eyes are closed, but she's sure he's awake. Hampton takes Iris's hand, brings it to his lips, while she stares intently ahead. And then, Kate sees Daniel glancing at Iris. Their eyes meet for a moment, but it has the impact of cymbals crashing. It is a shocking, agitating thing to see. It's like being in a store with someone and watching them steal something." Kate's violated sense of order is captured in perfectly chosen metaphors. This book, in which matters of sex and race are treated with unusual frankness, could well be both the critical and commercial surprise of this spring season.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A violent incident sends Daniel Emory, a successful white New York lawyer, back to his Hudson River hometown, where he is ensconced in edgy domesticity with his girlfriend, Kate Ellis, and her daughter, Ruby. His daily routine of taking Ruby to day care introduces him to Iris Davenport, a black woman whose son is Ruby's best friend. Daniel develops an obsessive attraction to Iris, who embodies for him the possibility of release from an emotional distance he has felt all his life. Iris tentatively returns the affection, yearning for her own respite from a frosty marriage to Hampton Welles, an investment banker, resident only on the weekends. A freak snowstorm affords the opportunity to begin an affair that sets in motion fierce jealousy--tinged with racial animus--in Kate and Hampton. This is an engaging novel of passion, romantic longing, race, class, family responsibilities, and the riveting anxieties of a couple embroiled in a relationship that cannot end well. Vanessa Bush
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A searching study of the chaotic side of love. -- People

Spencer is an enchanting writer. The steady, expanding intensity of his sentences do spellbinding justice to the misery and joy of romantic obsession.... “A Ship Made of Paper” rocks with suspense and daring. Things happen in this book that make you want to clap Spencer on the back for having the distorted mind to write and the skill to pull it off convincingly.... [he’s] at his best when capturing small, chillingly accurate moments. -- Salon.com

The beauty of this novel lies not only in the telling but in its commitment to the passionate life. -- Newsweek

“A Ship Made of Paper” rocks with suspense and daring. -- Salon.com

“A searching study of the chaotic side of love.” -- People

“Spencer is a magnificent writer.” -- Anne Tyler

No novelist alive knows the human heart better than Scott Spencer does. No one tells stories about human passion with greater urgency, insight, or sympathy. In A Ship Made of Paper, this artist of desire paints his most profound and compelling canvas yet.

After a shattering incidence of violence in New York City, Daniel Emerson has returned to the Hudson River town where he grew up. There, along with Kate Ellis and her daughter, Ruby, he settles into the kind of secure and comfortable family life he longed for during his emotionally barren childhood. But then he falls in love with Iris Davenport, the black woman whose son is Ruby's best friend. During a freak October blizzard, Daniel is stranded at Iris's house, and they spend the night together -- the beginning of a sexual liaison that eventually imperils all their relationships, Daniel's profession, their children's well-being, their own race-blindness, and their view of themselves as essentially good people. And the emotional stakes are raised even higher when Iris's husband, Hampton, suffers a devastating accidental injury at Daniel's hands.

A Ship Made of Paper captures all the drama, nuance, and helpless intensity of sexual and romantic yearning, and it bears witness to the age-old conflict between the order of the human community and the disorder of desire.

Scott Spencer is the author of seven previous novels, including Endless Love, which has sold more than two million copies. His other novels include The Rich Man's Table, Men in Black, and Waking the Dead, a film version of which was produced by Jodie Foster in 2000.