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Love can't find a way amid racial discord

Sunday, April 20, 2003

By John Freeman

Race relations always will be controlled by the fires of emotion. Scott Spencer understands this truth and uses it to construct a light comedy of manners.

Daniel Emerson, the novel's likable protagonist, has fled to Leyden, N.Y., a small town 100 miles up the Hudson River from Manhattan, after being attacked by black assailants.

	"A Ship Made of Paper" By Scott Spencer Ecco ($24.95)

But Emerson still can't escape thinking about race. He falls in love with Iris Davenport, a married African-American graduate student at a local university.

For weeks, Emerson waffles between self-loathing and punch-drunk bliss, swinging by Iris' house after dark just to see if she's there, hurrying home wondering if this infatuation isn't some kind of weird form of atonement for his racist fears.

Spencer wisely depicts this affair from both sides of the equation, and then brings in both Iris' and Emerson's significant others, turning this novel's cast into a pretzel of sexual envy.

Iris is unhappily married to Hampton, an investment banker whose love for his family's pedigree masks a hair-trigger insecurity of discrimination.

By contrast, Emerson's lover, Kate, is a Southern belle who attempts to stave off the brewing romance by scheduling a double-date with Iris and her husband.

Once it gets going, the affair between Emerson and Iris doesn't end well, but it has less to do with race or history than with how Spencer's excessively romantic hero invokes it. Emerson acts as if this tryst is a battle royal:

"So that will be the contest," he says to himself. "History in one corner and Love in the other? Fine. Ring the bell. Let the fight begin. Love ... will bring history to its knees."

Or not. Like the moony teenagers in Spencer's 1979 best-seller, "Endless Love," Emerson's biggest blind spot is not for the divide of race, but for his unfailing faith in love's ability to conquer all.

What Emerson doesn't understand is that many horrible things are done in the name of love, and his affair, as it turns out, is one of them. It ruins relationships, destroys his finances and brands him a liar around town.

One of the truly likable things about the book is that Spencer allows it to tack this way and that, moving from drama to high comedy like a boat pitching over waves.

Along the way, he adds a host of curious supporting characters to his crew, from a crooked local cop to a man of formerly great wealth who also wants to risk all for love.

Spencer takes a few missteps here, most notably in cluttering the beginning of each chapter with scenes from an event that occurs later in the novel, when Emerson and Hampton hunt for a missing blind girl.

At one point, Emerson accidentally burns him with a Roman candle, disfiguring him and making it impossible for Iris to ever dump the cad.

These flaws are easily forgotten, though, as Spencer delivers delights on every page.

What Emerson learns here is that the course of love is beset with pitfalls. To assume otherwise is to risk a comeuppance that's befallen so many John Updike characters.

His new knowledge won't help him save the world, nor will it erase racial prejudice. Most of the time, as evidenced in this lovely novel, it just gets you into a heap of trouble.

John Freeman is a freelance writer in New York.