It’s an affair you’d rather read about than live through. Kate, the girlfriend, is a jealous, unloving writer who’s on to Daniel before anything has actually happened, and descends into a zinfandel-fueled rage. Meanwhile, Iris’s husband, an investment banker named Hampton, pays more attention to racial slights (both real and imagined) than he does to his wife. After months of chatting with Iris and a few cups of coffee, Daniel takes Ruby over to Iris’s house to play with her son, and gets stuck there overnight in a snowstorm. Though the contrivance is as clunky as all the limbs crashing down under the weight of snow, Spencer, best known for the uber-passionate 1979 “Endless Love,” knows what to do once he gets his characters together. Rather than showing us the sex scene, he cuts to Iris, who’s never been to bed with a white man, as she takes her flashlight and investigates Daniel’s now sleeping body. Later, when Daniel flashes back to that night, the memory is sullied by all the sadness that night has caused. As the cover photo of a waterfall suggests, he’s about to sink.
Spencer cheats a little himself. In giving Daniel and Iris such unlikable partners, he makes their choices too easy. And although Spencer is neither timid nor heavy-handed in dealing with racism–no small feat–he uses the issue as a facile way to make a character ugly. Yet he’s acute at describing his people’s lust-driven calculations. Daniel’s love for Kate’s child “has taken on the harrowing qualities of a crime in the planning stages. She is the night watchman in a store he is going to rob, she is going to be in harm’s way.”
Spencer, bless him, doesn’t hesitate to give his lovers’ heat a cold shower. Daniel, a jazz connoisseur, is disappointed to find Fleetwood Mac and Boyz II Men records on Iris’s shelf. But he soon recovers. “He could take her wrist, he could pull her toward him, he could say, ‘No, I want to sleep with you,’ he could sigh, he could say, ‘I think we both know what’s going on here,’ he could play it cool and just say good night, he could place his hand over his heart, he could–somehow this, too, seems possible–burst into tears, yes, yes, he could try to boo-hoo her into bed.” This sort of insight, empathetic yet detached, transforms “A Ship Made of Paper” into an almost great novel. And like this illicit love affair, it sure is exciting while it lasts.
