Willing

published	March 1st 2008 by Ecco
binding	Hardcover
isbn	006076015X (isbn13: 9780060760151)
ebook
pages	256
description	Hailed as "the contemporary American master of the love story" (Publishers Weekly), bestselling author Scott Spencer takes us on a ps...more [close] Hailed as "the contemporary American master of the love story" (Publishers Weekly), bestselling author Scott Spencer takes us on a psychologically intense - and brilliantly funny - journey inside the world of international sex tourism. Avery Jankowsky is a thirty-seven-year-old Manhattan writer scraping by on freelance assignments. Despite his lack of ambition, and very much to his own surprise, he has won the affections of Deirdre, a Columbia grad student many years his junior. But when Deirdre tells him that she has been having an affair, Avery's world is shattered. Beside himself with jealousy and grief, Avery heads across town to meet his uncle Ezra for their monthly lunch date. Ezra senses his nephew's fragile emotional state and makes a startling proposition: Avery should use his tickets to an all-expenses-paid international sex tour. Sensing a white-hot book idea (and a chance to get back at Deirdre), Avery agrees to go as an undercover journalist. As the tour bounces from one Nordic country to another, Avery and his fellow travelers - most of them wealthy and accomplished - descend ever deeper into a blinding world that is equal parts hilarity and nightmare, until Avery suddenly finds himself face-to-face with the one person he never expected to see. A two-time National Book Award finalist, Spencer has already given us some of the most remarkable tales of love and passion in contemporary American fiction. Willing is at once a lighter and a darker performance, a startling tour de force that explores the limits of male restraint, the intoxications of privilege, the maddening dangers of freedom, and the knockdown, drag-out fight between our instincts and our better natures. [close]
date added	08-14-07 edit book

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Masha rated it:

03/29/08

Read in March, 2008

I saw Spencer read from Willing last week at McNally Robinson's in New York. As a premise, this novel had a lot of promise, but became tacky and melodramatic. A hornet's nest of men. I'm such a fan of Spencer's Endless Love and Waking The Dead--he's one of the great writers on obsessive love/desire. But Willing is an example of how "craft" upstages content. What does it mean to be "good at what you do," if what you're "good" at (technically) rings hollow?

What s...more I saw Spencer read from Willing last week at McNally Robinson's in New York. As a premise, this novel had a lot of promise, but became tacky and melodramatic. A hornet's nest of men. I'm such a fan of Spencer's Endless Love and Waking The Dead--he's one of the great writers on obsessive love/desire. But Willing is an example of how "craft" upstages content. What does it mean to be "good at what you do," if what you're "good" at (technically) rings hollow?

What starts off as a kind of fictional critique about male power, the modern (internet) culture of sex, and stereotypes of desire, devolves into a prison of cliches, which in some ways is really what oppresses us all. I was initially taken by the way Spencer discussed his book (at McNally's and on Fresh Air). But Willing is a miasma of gender-constructed hopelessness; of men stuck in their ruts, of men always getting in their, and women's, way. The idea--the Oedipal idea--which is also an idea of origins in the book, is that Noami, Avery's emotionally estranged mother, was the one who biologically and symbolically ushered Avery into a world of men, or patriarchal privilege, and by extension, a world of inevitable amorality (where you do things, as Bill Clinton said, "because you can"). Where if God isn't watching what you do, no one is. In other words, Noami has to "clean up the mess" she's made. Her four compulsive marriages, which tacked a new surname onto Avery each time, and eroded his moral compass, becomes a symbol of over-identification with men. Just as Noami has spent her life being a women who has been defined by men, and has defined herself through the men she was married to, she has to "save" her son from a life of homosocial over-determination. It isn't women these men are having "orgies" with, but men, who through sex, money, and power, are really affiliated with each other ("The Metal Men, however, were there, talking animatedly with each other and more or less ignoring the women they had chosen"). Thus, it becomes Noami's maternal and moral duty to extract (rescue) Avery from his male miasma and moral deterioration (the international sex tour he's on/investigating). Taking him home (a symbolic home, not just a geographic one), becomes a heavy-handed metaphor for a new beginning and masculine revisionism, but it also stands for a kind of intervention Noami never staged for Avery when he was a boy and that he needed in order to become a man who "respects women."

I think Spencer was trying to say something modern and important about ethics and sexual modernity (cyberspace, etc)--the ways in which desire is scripted and forced upon us, a kind of narrative we all have to culturally act out and conform to. But Spencer is stuck in time and in his own gender. Generationally, he might not be entirely right for the job. It's a view from the past, a cliched lens built on a very new dilemma (the excess and total ubiquity of media); the dilemma of living in a world where "everything's for sale." If Avery has the enlightenment but doesn't use it, what does that mean for all of us? ...less

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Willing

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