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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Bored At The Orgy, June 3, 2008
This review is from: Willing (Hardcover)
When an author who I immensely respect -- I devoured other Scott Spencer books -- describes a sex orgy and my reaction is to quickly flip pages, I know that something is amiss. And, in my opinion, something is in his newest novel.
The novel begins promising enough. Avery, a 37-year-old New Yorker with a troubled childhood (he had four fathers while growing up), begins an affair with Deirdre, who eventually betrays him. His uncle, sensing his emotional state, offers to give him a ticket to a very upscale international sex tour. Interesting premise.
But here's where the book begins to go astray. Avery receives a book deal of his own to report on this all-expenses-paid luxury trip. The result is a reportorial style; each participant is reported on, each location, etc. -- without anything coming alive, for this reader.
At one point, Spencer reveals his mission: "If we can't find our way back to where something began, what hope do we have of ever understanding why we are where we are?" The tour explores these questions: our baser instincts versus our higher ones, our freedoms versus our constraints, our past versus our present and future. There are many Oedipal threads that run through the book and the ending, which makes ample use of them, was downright irritating to me.
Scott Spencer is a fine writer who, especially in some of his metaphors, makes it look effortless. He has done better and I'd encourage other readers to explore his earlier works.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
More Endless Lust, April 1, 2008
This review is from: Willing (Hardcover)
In Scott Spencer's latest novel WILLING Avery Jankowsky, the first person narrator, is thirty-seven, a down-and-out writer with not much success in his profession and even less in his love life. He is both the casualty of a brief marriage and an affair with a younger woman Deidre who confesses to him that she has been sleeping with another man. He also is obsessed about his mother's four marriages and his having to change his last name for each new stepfather. To salve his sorrow, his Uncle Ezra sends him on a $135,000 sex tour with stops in Reykjavik, Oslo and Riga. Avery sees his sex junket as a chance to get a good piece of journalism out of the trip as well.
What transpires is often a comedy of errors but with an undercurrent of sadness and weariness under the froth of sexual excess. Such a motley group of fellow prostitute hounds you are unlikely to meet. They provide much of the humor but ultimate sorrow in Mr. Spencer's story. You will meet an aging doctor and his son who is a casualty of the war in Iraq, a former NBA player, a lottery winner who sends postcards back home, a very successful but dishonest businessman who has done jail time, a knife-- as in kitchen-- salesman, a man from three generations of film people-- his father made Bible epics in the 1950's but he is reduced to designing bumper stickers. The list goes on. The so-called top-of-the-line prostitutes do not fare much better under Mr. Spencer's observant eye. Four of these women (Icelandic) who meet the hungry men-- he describes as marching in single file, "like four waitresses coming in for the dinner shift." One of them waves, "like someone in a rowboat signalng for help." Another had the "soft sorrowful gaze of a hospice volunteer."
Mr. Spencer is nothing if not a wordsmith. Other examples of his writing prowess: A cafeteria Christian is "someone who helps himself to the easy and attractive parts and ignores those parts that are inconvenient or call for self-sacrifice." Avery has no illusions about his writing assignments, understanding that he is not writing the ODYSSEY and that everything he writes for a newspaper or magazine ultimately will wind up in the bottom of a bird cage. He knows "where the caged bird "c--ps." One character gives a "silent double entendre." Another character Avery describes as someone who looks like a "youngish widow, pleasantly surprised by how far her late husband's pension could be stretched with a few small economies." I can think of no contemporary writer better at describing place than Mr. Spencer. His descriptions of the cities the sex tour takes these men to are a joy to read, particularly his account of Riga.
A major flaw of this otherwise successful novel, however, is the ending (I won't spoil it for the reader) which I found unsatisfactory and unconvincing. I kept wondering how Mr. Spencer could bring this story to a conclusion. With this many balls in the air his task is difficult. Finally Mr. Spencer does not use apostrophes when he writes dialogue; nor does he separate the speakers by paragraphs, a distraction that sometimes makes reading difficult. Even though the whole is not greater than the sum of the parts, WILLING is still well worth reading.
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13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"You can't always care about what you do, and how you behave.", March 25, 2008
This review is from: Willing (Hardcover)
If I had to express one thing about this book it would be: Wow, this man can write! By why stop there? I heard Scott Spencer on my car's radio the other day when tuned to NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and even though I arrived at my destination, I stayed seated with my seatbelt in place just to hear him read more excerpts from this unusual story, Willing. This is a book that goes by quickly, even though the structure (a complete lack of dialog punctuation) requires you to read slowly. A writer's writer, Spencer is a master of description and has a keen wit filled with gritty, streetwise originality. From the initial description of his narrator, Avery Jankowsky, to every curious character leading up to and embarking upon an around the world sex tour, which is the heart of this dark tale, possibly the only thing short-changed is the answer to the question, who was the man doing pushups in room 420 of the Hotel Christofer? Other than that, this story holds nothing back.
Avery is a freelance writer in his late 30s, who has just discovered his young girlfriend has been unfaithful. Already damaged by being raised by four fathers and a self-centered mother, he accepts an opportunity presented by his Uncle Ezra to sleep with beautiful women in a series of Nordic countries. It's a $135,000 gift, which leads to a book opportunity that will have enormous financial benefits--thus solving his previous fate of being poor. As if that were the basis of all his problems.
As the trip unfolds, Avery learns there is a very high price to pay for the decisions he's made. "Even the milk from our mother's breast comes with a bill that we are eventually meant to pay." And his mother, Naomi, makes this all very clear. Avery tries to justify his lapse into debauchery by telling himself things like (the headline of this review), "you can't always care about what you do and how you behave;" however, it's Naomi who shows him the exact opposite is true.
This is excellent work and I give it my highest recommendation.
Michele Cozzens is the author of It's Not Your Mother's Bridge Club
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