Love that wounds

Romantic excess is Scott Spencer’s stock in trade. In his best-known novel, “Endless Love,” a teenage boy forbidden to continue seeing his lover sets fire to her house, hoping to earn her parents’ gratitude by “rescuing” her. The fire, like his passion, burns out of control and results in tragedy.

In “A Ship Made of Paper,” Spencer returns to this theme. This time, however, his lovers are adults. Daniel Emerson is a lawyer who has left a New York City practice for a slower-paced life upstate in his hometown, Leyden, on the Hudson River. He lives with Kate Ellis, a blocked novelist who has turned to journalism, and Kate’s preschool-age daughter, Ruby. Iris Davenport is a graduate student in perennial search of a doctoral thesis topic; her husband, Hampton Welles, is an investment banker. Their son, Nelson, is Ruby’s best friend.

Daniel is white. Iris is black. Their mutual attraction is as powerful and simple as if they too were teenagers, but the racial subtext of their affair is complicated. Daniel is a fan of African American culture in general, but he fled New York out of fear of particular black people. When he failed to get a drug dealer acquitted, other gangsters threatened his life and beat him up. Kate’s journalistic specialty is the O.J. Simpson murder trial. She is convinced of Simpson’s guilt, and Daniel’s reaction to this is one of her first clues that he might be in love with Iris. Iris experiences her share of racial slights in Leyden, but she mostly wants to cast off the burden of blackness and lead an apolitical life. This is a source of friction with Hampton, a scion of America’s black aristocracy who is hyper-aware of such slights and deeply resentful of the upper-class whites whose lifestyle he meticulously imitates.

Kate, survivor of a bad marriage, distrusts passion and intensity. She was drawn to Daniel, survivor of a loveless upbringing, because he seemed to feel the same way. Together, she thought, they would have “a levelheaded alliance; they would be Swiss bankers of the heart.” When Daniel betrays Kate, he also shatters her idea of him, and she gropes for explanations, which Spencer puts in her mouth a little too neatly: “He’s like an orphan.... He doesn’t feel as if he belongs anywhere. He moves back to his home town -- and moves me back with him, by the way. He has no idea why.... He wants something big to happen to him, something to tell him who he is, or make him something.... He may end up saying that he’s black. I wouldn’t be surprised.”

It’s obvious from the beginning that Daniel and Iris are headed for trouble. They may break up two families, hurt their partners and the children, endure painful scenes, feel guilt and social isolation -- all in addition to the usual stresses of an interracial relationship. But Spencer isn’t satisfied with this. He wants excess, an operatic quality. Sometimes this works. The lovers spend their first night together in a house cut off from the world by a freak October snowstorm that topples thousands of trees and blocks the roads. But the climax of the novel is marred by an accident so implausible that its drama is negated.

At bottom, “A Ship Made of Paper” is a John Updike book: a story of adultery among affluent East Coast people who may be lustful and selfish but are too civilized to do grievous harm. In fact, Spencer’s prose tends to imitate Updike’s -- the local detail, the wit and irony, and the leisurely pace (which, without Updike’s lyrical gift, often seems downright slow). But Spencer’s intention, it appears, was to write a Joyce Carol Oates novel instead -- a novel in which things go bang, in which real disaster is possible, in which romantic passion is indistinguishable from madness.

Another “Endless Love,” in other words. And this time his characters and setting can’t support such an aim -- at least not without Spencer making us feel that he’s trying much too hard.