Scott Spencer looks harmless enough, and in his 19 years in the self-consciously charming Hudson Valley town of Rhinebeck there is no record of his running amok through its leafy streets.
It's a different story in his books. Spencer's great theme, explored most famously in his explosive early novel "Endless Love," is erotic passion and its shattering consequences. It's a theme that appears to have chosen him rather than vice versa, and one he insists is universal. "All of us entertain these thoughts," he says, adding that it would be harder to write about characters who are hopelessly phlegmatic: "I think novelists really identify with people who are obsessive."
Spencer's new novel, "A Ship Made of Paper" (Ecco, $24.95), tells the story of an obsessive love affair between a white man and a black woman, each of whom has a spouse (or near-spouse) and a child (or stepchild), and like most of Spencer's work it is alternately funny and heartrending, sometimes simultaneously.
Given some of his previous books, it's perhaps no surprise that Spencer has produced the literary equivalent of a "Scared Straight" video for anyone considering some serious marital infidelity. But why add race to such a volatile mix?
"The racial divide in this country is such a great, powerful, indescribable, painful illustration of all we have to deal with that we didn't really make ourselves," he says over coffee in the neighboring village of Red Hook. "It seemed like a perfect way to illustrate what romantic passion can accomplish, and what it can't."
Spencer says he worried about finding himself in hot water for his handling of race and his portrayal of African-Americans. So he was all the more pleased when Toni Morrison wrote to say she liked the book. "No white writer can escape scrutiny when he's talking about race," Spencer says. "That's not the worst thing in the world, either."
In fact, he says, wrestling with that dimension of the novel prolonged the project by a year. Spencer works steadily, producing a couple of pages or more every day on an IBM Selectric typewriter that gives him "more forward momentum" than the personal computer he uses later in the process. Despite his work habits, the new book took him 4 1/2 years to finish, and Spencer figures he wrote perhaps 3,000 pages to produce the few hundred that ultimately saw print.
Courtly, curly haired and fleshy, Spencer laughs readily and speaks earnestly, only now and then playing the wise guy, and even then only sotto voce. At 57, he acknowledges having had his share of romantic Sturm und Drang, including a divorce. There is about him the gentle air and reluctance to offend of someone who has survived something terrible. Judging from his books - which include "Waking the Dead" and the underappreciated "Preservation Hall" - this is a man who knows the emotional territory he writes about as well as he knows Rhinebeck, whose fictional twin, the Hudson Valley town of Leyden, is the setting for four Spencer novels, including his latest.
"A Ship Made of Paper" thus offers locals the secret thrill of spotting familiar places and sometimes even people bobbing along in the author's fictional ether. One of the most readily identifiable is a college president named Ethan Greenblatt, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Bard College president Leon Botstein. Also making a cameo appearance is Sam Holland, the central figure from "Men in Black," Spencer's comic account of a struggling novelist whose home life is turned upside down by a fleeting erotic adventure. This time Sam is squiring around the underaged daughter of a local cop. "Sam's in freefall," the author chuckles guiltily.
As in Leyden, African-Americans are scarce in Rhinebeck, an ever-more-prosperous community with a notably more upscale character than the surrounding rural towns. But Spencer shares with his latest protagonist, Daniel Emerson, a longstanding affinity for black culture, especially the music associated with Spencer's hometown of Chicago. The novel's title comes from a blues song, and in the book, Emerson is disappointed to discover that his black lover's bland taste in music doesn't include his own soulful favorites. Spencer particularly likes Muddy Waters, Junior Wells and "the three Kings" (Albert, B.B. and Freddie), but his love of music extends to a collection of more than 1,000 CDs covering a range of genres.
Like some of his characters, Spencer is Jewish, and he cites a number of Jewish novelists among his literary influences, including Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Stanley Elkin and Wallace Markfield. But a "Ship Made of Paper" seems at least equally indebted to "Anna Karenina," featuring as it does a dilettantish heroine, the anal-compulsive husband she will betray and an awful lot of snow.
Given the collateral damage that always seems to flow from unchecked passion in Spencer's works, it's difficult not to wonder if the author is suggesting that the price of romantic obsession is just too high. Aren't Daniel Emerson and Iris Davenport cursed by their uncontrollable attraction to one another? Their creator begs to differ. "If you were to ask them would they do it over again," Spencer replies with sudden urgency, "they would say yes."