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Daniel Emerson lives with Kate Ellis, and he is like a father to her daughter, Ruby. But he cannot control his desire for Iris Davenport, the African-American woman whose son is Ruby's best friend. During a freak October blizzard, Daniel is stranded at Iris's house, and they begin 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.
Finalist for the 2003 National Book Award, Fiction.
Scott Spencer is the author of nine previous novels, including A Ship Made of Paper, Waking the Dead, and the international bestseller Endless Love. He has written for Rolling Stone, the New York Times, The New Yorker, GQ, and Harper’s, and has taught writing at Columbia University, the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Williams College, and for the Bard Prison Initiative. He lives in Rhinebeck, New York.
Less fortunately for Spencer, Endless Love also attracted the attention of Franco Zeffirelli, who directed a disastrous Brooke Shields vehicle based on the book (the 1981 movie periodically turns up on critics' lists of the worst movies of all time). But while Endless Love was, as Jonathan Lethem opined in Salon, a good book overshadowed by a bad movie, Spencer's next novel, about a political candidate haunted by the memory of his late fiancée, got an actual boost from Hollywood. After Keith Gordon filmed Waking the Dead in 1999 with Billy Crudup and Jennifer Connelly in the lead roles, the book was reissued, gaining thousands of new readers. As Spencer notes in an interview on his publisher's web site, "The best thing about having a movie made of your novel is that more people read the book."
Spencer published several books between the first edition of Waking the Dead and its reissue, including Men in Black, the tale of a literary novelist whose pseudonymous hackwork earns him sudden fame and fortune, and The Rich Man's Table, the fictional memoir of a Dylan-like folk singer's illegitimate son. The Los Angeles Times Book Review called Men in Black "the Cadillac of novels -- every word vibrating with a kind of shameless big-boned American grace."
With his recent novel A Ship Made of Paper, Spencer returns to his earlier themes: romantic obsession and overpowering desire. "What makes this brave, dazzling novel so impossible to put down is the urgency with which it makes you care about what happens to its characters: male and female, black and white, young and old," wrote Francine Prose. "Scott Spencer has a genius for observing dramatic everyday moments when the self crashes into the barriers of class and race and culture, together with infinite compassion for the wayward impulse that turns human beings into fanatics willing to sacrifice everything on the altar of romantic love."
Critics have credited Spencer with an ambitious prose style and a keen grasp of contemporary culture, but what distinguishes his work most is his ability to tap into the intense currents of emotion beneath the surface of domestic life. As New York magazine noted, "In a literary age marked by cool, cerebral fiction, Spencer writes from the heart."
Spencer has taught fiction writing at Columbia University and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has written for The New York Times, Esquire, The Nation, GQ, and Rolling Stone, among other publications.
The film version of Endless Love, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, was (as TV Guide put it) "a notorious disaster," but it marked the film debut of three future stars: Tom Cruise, James Spader, and Jami Gertz. The movie's theme song won Lionel Ritchie an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song.
A Ship Made of Paper is the fourth novel of Spencer's that uses Leyden, New York as a backdrop.
Daniel and Hampton were paired by chance and against their wishes. They were not friends -- Hampton did not particularly like Daniel, and Daniel had every reason to avoid being alone with Hampton. But Daniel's girlfriend or partner or whatever he was supposed to call her, Kate, Kate went home to relieve the baby-sitter who was minding her daughter, and Hampton's wife, there was no ambiguity there, his wife, Iris, with whom Daniel was fiercely in love, had gone home to look after their son. Daniel and Hampton stayed behind to search for a blind girl, a heartsick and self-destructive blind girl who had run away from today's cocktail party, either to get lost or to be found, no one was sure.
The searchers, fourteen in all, were each given a Roman candle -- whoever found the lost girl was to fire the rocket into the sky, so the others would know -- and each of the pairs was assigned a section of the property in which to look for Marie.
"Looks like you and me," Daniel said to Hampton, because he had to say something. Hampton barely responded and he continued to only minimally acknowledge Daniel's nervous chatter as they walked away from the mansion through an untended expanse of wild grass that soon led into a dense wood of pine, locust, maple, and oak. Aside from the contrast of their color -- Daniel was white, Hampton black -- the two men were remarkably similar in appearance. They were both in their mid-thirties, an inch or so over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, reasonably fit. They were even dressed similarly, in khaki pants, white shirts, and blue blazers, though Daniel's jacket was purchased at Macy's,and Hampton's had been sewn specially for him by a Chinese tailor in the city.
Two years after he was kicked down the stairs of his apartment building in New York City, which shattered his wrist, chipped his front tooth, and, as he himself put it, broke his heart, Daniel Emerson is back in his hometown, driving Ruby, his girlfriend's four-year-old daughter, to her day care center, called My Little Wooden Shoe. The drive is ten or fifteen minutes, depending on the weather, and though Daniel is not Ruby's father, nor her stepfather, it usually falls to him to take the little girl in. Daniel cannot understand how she can so willingly and unfailingly absent herself from the beginnings of her daughter's day; Ruby's mother, Kate Ellis, cannot bear to rise early in the morning, nor can she bear the thought of having to deal with Melody, or Tammy, Keith, Tamara, Griffin, Elijah, Avery, Stephanie, Joel, Tess, Chantal, Dylan, or any of the other Wooden Shoers, not to mention their fathers and their mothers, a few of whom Daniel knew thirty-two years ago in this very town, when he was Ruby's age.
It's fine with Daniel. He welcomes the chance to do fatherly things with the little girl, and those ten morning minutes with dear little four-year-old Ruby, with her deep soulful eyes, and the wondrous things she sees with them, and her deep soulful voice, and the precious though not entirely memorable things she says with it, and the smell of baby shampoo and breakfast cereal filling the car, that little shimmering capsule of time is like listening to cello music in the morning, or watching birds in a flutter of industry building a nest, it simply reminds you that even if God is dead, or never existed in the first place, there is, nevertheless, something tender at the center of creation, some meaning, some purpose and poetry. He believes in parental love with the fervency of a man who himself was not loved, and those ten minutes with Ruby every weekday morning, before he drops her off at My Little Wooden Shoe and then drives over to his office, where he runs a poorly paying, uneventful country law practice, in the fairly uneventful town of Leyden, one hundred miles north of New York City, those six hundred sweet seconds are his form of worship, and the temperamental eight-year-old black Saab is his church.
Or was, actually, because, unfortunately, this is no longer the case. The drive is still ten minutes, Ruby is still snugly strapped in her child safety seat in the back of the car, her sturdy little body encased in lilac overalls, her short-fingered, square hands holding a box of raisins and a box of grape juice, and today she is commenting on the familiar landmarks they pass -- the big kids' school, the abandoned apple orchard where the wizened old trees wreathed in autumn morning mist are so scarily bent, the big yellow farmhouse where there is always some sort of yard sale, the massive pasture where every July the county fair assembles, with its cows and snow cones, Ferris wheels and freaks -- but today it is all Daniel can do to pay the slightest bit of attention to Ruby, because his mind is seized, possessed, and utterly filled by one repeating question: Will Iris be there?
Daniel has been carrying the unwieldy weight of this desire for months now, and so far his behavior has been impeccable. When it comes to Iris the rules he has made for himself are simple: look but don't touch, long for but don't have, think but don't say. All he wants to do is be in the same room with her, see what she is wearing, see by her eyes if she has slept well, exchange a few words, make her smile, hear her say his name.
Until recently, it was a matter of chance whether their paths would cross. Iris's deliveries and pickups of Nelson were helter-skelter, one day she'd have him there at eight o'clock, and the next at nine-thirty -- it all depended on her class schedule at Marlowe College ...
A Ship Made of PaperDaniel and Hampton were paired by chance and against their wishes. They were not friends -- Hampton did not particularly like Daniel, and Daniel had every reason to avoid being alone with Hampton. But Daniel's girlfriend or partner or whatever he was supposed to call her, Kate, Kate went home to relieve the baby-sitter who was minding her daughter, and Hampton's wife, there was no ambiguity there, his wife, Iris, with whom Daniel was fiercely in love, had gone home to look after their son. Daniel and Hampton stayed behind to search for a blind girl, a heartsick and self-destructive blind girl who had run away from today's cocktail party, either to get lost or to be found, no one was sure.
The searchers, fourteen in all, were each given a Roman candle -- whoever found the lost girl was to fire the rocket into the sky, so the others would know -- and each of the pairs was assigned a section of the property in which to look for Marie.
"Looks like you and me," Daniel said to Hampton, because he had to say something. Hampton barely responded and he continued to only minimally acknowledge Daniel's nervous chatter as they walked away from the mansion through an untended expanse of wild grass that soon led into a dense wood of pine, locust, maple, and oak. Aside from the contrast of their color -- Daniel was white, Hampton black -- the two men were remarkably similar in appearance. They were both in their mid-thirties, an inch or so over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, reasonably fit. They were even dressed similarly, in khaki pants, white shirts, and blue blazers, though Daniel's jacket was purchased at Macy's, and Hampton's had been sewn specially for him by a Chinese tailor in the city.
Two years after he was kicked down the stairs of his apartment building in New York City, which shattered his wrist, chipped his front tooth, and, as he himself put it, broke his heart, Daniel Emerson is back in his hometown, driving Ruby, his girlfriend's four-year-old daughter, to her day care center, called My Little Wooden Shoe. The drive is ten or fifteen minutes, depending on the weather, and though Daniel is not Ruby's father, nor her stepfather, it usually falls to him to take the little girl in. Daniel cannot understand how she can so willingly and unfailingly absent herself from the beginnings of her daughter's day; Ruby's mother, Kate Ellis, cannot bear to rise early in the morning, nor can she bear the thought of having to deal with Melody, or Tammy, Keith, Tamara, Griffin, Elijah, Avery, Stephanie, Joel, Tess, Chantal, Dylan, or any of the other Wooden Shoers, not to mention their fathers and their mothers, a few of whom Daniel knew thirty-two years ago in this very town, when he was Ruby's age.
It's fine with Daniel. He welcomes the chance to do fatherly things with the little girl, and those ten morning minutes with dear little four-year-old Ruby, with her deep soulful eyes, and the wondrous things she sees with them, and her deep soulful voice, and the precious though not entirely memorable things she says with it, and the smell of baby shampoo and breakfast cereal filling the car, that little shimmering capsule of time is like listening to cello music in the morning, or watching birds in a flutter of industry building a nest, it simply reminds you that even if God is dead, or never existed in the first place, there is, nevertheless, something tender at the center of creation, some meaning, some purpose and poetry. He believes in parental love with the fervency of a man who himself was not loved, and those ten minutes with Ruby every weekday morning, before he drops her off at My Little Wooden Shoe and then drives over to his office, where he runs a poorly paying, uneventful country law practice, in the fairly uneventful town of Leyden, one hundred miles north of New York City, those six hundred sweet seconds are his form of worship, and the temperamental eight-year-old black Saab is his church.
Or was, actually, because, unfortunately, this is no longer the case. The drive is still ten minutes, Ruby is still snugly strapped in her child safety seat in the back of the car, her sturdy little body encased in lilac overalls, her short-fingered, square hands holding a box of raisins and a box of grape juice, and today she is commenting on the familiar landmarks they pass -- the big kids' school, the abandoned apple orchard where the wizened old trees wreathed in autumn morning mist are so scarily bent, the big yellow farmhouse where there is always some sort of yard sale, the massive pasture where every July the county fair assembles, with its cows and snow cones, Ferris wheels and freaks -- but today it is all Daniel can do to pay the slightest bit of attention to Ruby, because his mind is seized, possessed, and utterly filled by one repeating question: Will Iris be there?
Daniel has been carrying the unwieldy weight of this desire for months now, and so far his behavior has been impeccable. When it comes to Iris the rules he has made for himself are simple: look but don't touch, long for but don't have, think but don't say. All he wants to do is be in the same room with her, see what she is wearing, see by her eyes if she has slept well, exchange a few words, make her smile, hear her say his name.
Until recently, it was a matter of chance whether their paths would cross. Iris's deliveries and pickups of Nelson were helter-skelter, one day she'd have him there at eight o'clock, and the next at nine-thirty -- it all depended on her class schedule at Marlowe College ...
A Ship Made of PaperThis book was very well written. It was very descriptive and detailed which I like because I can place myself at the scene of what is going on. I thought the book dragged a slight bit in the beginning but it picked up quickly. Overall I would say this book was good. The only negative would be the ending. It didn't really have one, which is kind of upsetting when you invest time into a book only to be left wondering what happened to so and so and how about this one and that one.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Carajoy
Posted February 15, 2009
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I loved this book. I felt the ending could have been a little stronger, but the intensity and honesty of the characters are both touching and humbling.
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Posted December 13, 2008
An unapologetic book about adultery and interracial relationships. It's beautifully complex in both theme and style. The writer interweaves snippets of the ending chapters which he then puts together quite powerfully.
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Posted February 27, 2005
This was my first Scott Spencer novel and it truly consumed me. Excellent exploration of race in America through the lens of an interracial relationship. It was throughly fascinating to see it through the eyes of a white male loving an African American female with an extremely successful black husband.It dealt with issues that makes a novel great: infidelity, the legal system (juxtaposed against O.J. trial) and everyones' demons when it comes to race relations.
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Posted June 30, 2004
This book had the worst grammatical and sentence structure that I have ever witnessed. I understand fully that the style of the literature is what makes a writer unique, yet the rules of grammar and sentence structure apply to us all. The paragraphs of this book read like one unending sentence, and like a very confused thought.
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Posted May 26, 2004
As much as I enjoyed Scott Spencer's latest novel, I must say it left me feeling very ambivalent and unsure as to how to reconcile the emotions it left me with. As a black woman in a committed interracial relationship, this book was of particular interest to me. I was looking forward to seeing how such a fantastically gifted writer would handle such a sensitive and volatile issue. Much of the social interactions, unspoken mores and certain aspects of the characters ring true. I actually know people like Hampton Welles. I most sympathized with Daniel, the best developed character in the book. One truly got a sense of his torment and the astronomical price he had to pay to attain the one thing worth living for(and he never really got it). It truly left me with a sense of hope and despair; the resolve of these two tragic characters to contunue on this perilous and bumpy road and the anticipation of a possible love child with the former, and the complete and utter powerlessness of these two thrown together in a relationship that cognitively they know can only end in disaster as it exerts its ripple effect of pain and confusion with the latter.....Very Bittersweet
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Posted June 6, 2004
This book was stunning. This was my first Scott Spencer book and I was so amazed at his writing. The characters were so interesting and intriguing. Why did Daniel fall for Iris? Why did Kate leave her NY life and put up with Daniel? Why did Iris stay with her husband? I love books that don't complete things in a nice pretty package because that isn't real life. Life is hard and complicated and this book was a good example of people trying to make their way through the life they chose and how tragic things can turn. Nobody intentionally meant to hurt anyone but it happens. I hated for this book to end. If you like emotional stories, this is for you.
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Posted March 16, 2004
I am still not sure whether this novel depressed or uplifted me. On one hand, it can be seen as the triumph of love despite racial tension, prior attachments and violence. On the other hand it portrays the tragedy of a love that brings remorse to all involved and then can never fully be realized anyway. I thought the book dealt brilliantly with social issues, using the OJ Simpson trial to illustrate the greater racial tension that exists in the novel. Some of the events in the novel, however, are a bit too coincidental. They are symbolically fascinating, but make the book seem much less realistic and thus much less effective.
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Posted March 1, 2004
I thoroughly enjoyed the book, one that I would suggest to a friend or coworker. Scott Spencer wove together all of the thoughts, ideas, and fears that some people hold about race and interacial relationships. I think he gives the reader a chance to view race, relationships, and infidelity through the lives of an African-American woman and a Caucasian male. It is great to see that through their differences, Iris and Daniel, they were able to love. What better story line than that?
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Posted November 5, 2003
A member of my book group suggested this book based on an excerpt she heard on National Public Radio. Unfortunately, after reading the book, she admits that the excerpt she heard was the only part of the book she enjoyed. The few other members who completed the book also voiced their disappointment with it. Personally, I struggled to get through the whole thing as I found it pretty boring. I didn't enjoy any of the characters and never felt the passion between the two lovers. The only portion I found entertaining was the chapter on the storm. I also found the ending to be anti-climatic and found myself happy that I had finally finished it.
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Posted November 16, 2003
A catchy title, but unfortunately, I never found myself caught up in the plot. I thought that the characters were poorly developed; each seemed so one-dimensional. I never bought into the love affair between the two main characters. Even at the end of the book, I never figured out why they fell in love. Considering the overall theme of the book, it lacked any sense of emotion. My book club picked this as a selection and we chose not to even discuss it due to everyone's lack of interest in it.
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Posted October 6, 2003
I picked up this book after reading a review in 'O' magazine. After letting it sit for a week or so, I finally picked it up. I must say, after that I could not put it down! Although Daniel always seems to be in the wrong place at the right time...Iris' house, the woods, Iris' house again..this time with a gun being there too, I enjoyed this book. It's fiction, a love story, passionate, daring,consuming, forgiving. We should all love so deeply? To give up everything? The opinons on that are as vast as the universe. The ending left much to be desired. I guess we as readers have to form our own endings based on our feelings about the subject matter. Do they make it together or not?
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Posted July 27, 2003
I am a black female and I must say that after having read this book, I am a little upset by some of the references made by Spencer in the book. For example, what does he mean by having Iris say that it is so much work being black?' What exactly is so hard about being black????? Would he ever have a white character say it is so much work being white or a Jewish character saying that is so much work being Jewish? I also had some problems with his representation of Iris's husband. I don't know, I just came out of it feeling like the black characters in this book were more like what Mr. Spencer thinks about black people rather than what is actually true about black people.
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Posted August 11, 2003
Generally, I liked this book, however, as a former speech therapist, having dealt with many aphasic patients, I just couldn't get past Spencer's contrived portrayal of Hampton Welles' global aphasia being a result of suffering an injury to his throat with a Roman candle. Huh? Had Mr. Spencer done his homework on this matter, he would have found that (1) Global Aphasia is somewhat rare and (2) Aphasia is the result of a brain injury (usually thrombosis or embolism from a stroke) and NOT the result of a throat injury which, by the way would likely have rendered Hampton unable to phonate. Perhaps he was saying that Hampton suffered a stroke as a result of the firework hitting his throat however, it more than likely would have killed him in either case. Nevertheless, he was able to evoke strong feelings toward his characters (I wanted to smack the little black kid on several occasions) by way of his prose. I did think Daniel's portrayal as being a magnet to tragedy, bad decisions and being in the wrong place at the wrong time somewhat contrived. The collective incidents in the book made his character somewhat unbelieveable. Nevertheless, Spencer made it easy to see how many lives can be affected by one ill-conceived decision or choice.
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Posted June 20, 2003
The main characters are complex, but not murderous or evil. The townspeople don't suffer from that smarmy, 'just folks' stereotype or the other extreme: the distrustful, backwoods weirdos. There is an interesting echo of the Daniel/Iris affair in the Ferguson/Marie story. These are not idealized people, but they are open to themselves, and I like that. But I really like that the main characters are adults. I had a hard time with the teenager image in 'Endless Love.
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Posted May 29, 2003
Interesting and mostly compelling read about the dynamics of human relationships although I found the circumstances of Hampton's accident at the hands of Daniel somewhat contrived. Several other circumstantial events pushed the limits of credibility. The unresolved ending left me 'hanging out there'. Somehow Daniel's compulsive and addictive behavior does not ring true.
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Posted March 20, 2003
The ending alone makes this book worth the read.
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Posted April 29, 2011
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Posted June 29, 2010
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Posted April 20, 2011
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Overview
Daniel Emerson lives with Kate Ellis, and he is like a father to her daughter, Ruby. But he cannot control his desire for Iris Davenport, the African-American woman whose son is Ruby's best friend. During a freak October blizzard, Daniel is stranded at Iris's house, and they begin 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.
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