A Ship Made of Paper (51 page)
She crosses her fingers. “Want to see something?” She stands, lifts her T-shirt, exposing her belly. “Look how fat I’m getting.”
“I don’t see it.You look the same.”
“Are you kidding? Look!” She grabs an inch of skin, shakes it. “I might be pregnant.”
Daniel struggles to keep his expression detached. But he thinks
if
only.
He takes another mouthful of her food.
“That would be all we need, wouldn’t it?” says Iris.
“Do you really think you might be?”
“I don’t know. I sure feel bloated.Who knows? Maybe we can be one of those couples who think they can solve the world’s problems by creating a new race, or a non-race, or whatever.”
“That might be a good idea.”
She smiles, shakes her head. “I actually have to go. I told Sandra I’d be right back.”
“How’s Hampton? Nelson?”
“Let’s not even talk about them. Can you do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“I have to leave, honey. I’m sorry.”
“Thanks for the food.”
“You were starved.”
“It’s good. Soul food.”
“Not really. There’s no ham hocks or any of that old-timey crap.”
“It’s still soul food.”
a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
Iris kisses his forehead, strokes his hair again.
“Do you still love me?”
“Yes,” Daniel says.
“This is so hard.”
“I know.”
“Don’t you sometimes wish . . . ?”
He reaches for her. “No,” he says. “It’s too late for that. There’s no turning back.”
Reading Group Guide for
A Ship Made of Paper
By Scott Spencer
Introduction
Nearly two decades have passed since Daniel Emerson resided in Leyden, New York. Now, after becoming the target of violence, Daniel has left New York City behind and returned to the tranquil Hudson Valley town of his childhood. Setting up a law practice and settling into a new home with his journalist girlfriend, Kate, and her young daughter, Ruby, Daniel once again eases into the rhythms of life in a small town.
Denied a loving childhood by his austere parents, Daniel revels in caring for Ruby. In doing so, he crosses paths with Iris Davenport, whose son becomes Ruby's best friend. Daniel finds himself drawn to Iris, a black graduate student at the local college, who is married to a financier husband who commutes to Leyden on weekends. Iris finds life in Leyden comforting, while her husband, Hampton, sees racial slights everywhere in the actions of the town's residents.
As his attraction to Iris grows, Daniel contemplates the state of his own life and his relationship with Kate. When a dramatic October blizzard blankets the town, Daniel and Ruby are stranded at Iris's house.
Daniel and Iris’s flirtation escalates into a night of passion, and their affair continues despite the complications it causes in both of their lives.
But when a twist of fate brings about an unexpected tragedy, Daniel and Iris are forced to confront the reality of their situation—and the collat-eral damage it does to those closest to them.
A Ship Made of Paper
is a voyage into small town life, as the lives of its inhabitants change and intertwine in ways that are both typical and startling. In this domestic drama filled with tension and passion, Scott Spencer tells an unforgettable tale about a man whose circumstances are at once unique and universal.
Questions for Discussion
1. The author opens each of the first thirteen chapters with a narrative thread that eventually culminates in the pivotal scene in the book—
chapter fourteen's depiction of Hampton and Daniel's search for Marie in the woods. From the first page, this narrative thread sets up the issue of race and lays out key aspects of the story—the animosity between Daniel and Hampton, and the fact that Daniel is involved with Kate but is in love with Hampton's wife. Did this technique enhance the drama of the story? Why or why not?
2. The four main characters could easily have met in Manhattan, where they all lived at one time, and yet the author chose to set the book in a small town. In what ways is the setting integral to the story? How might it have differed if it had been set in a large city?
3. How does the author use the circumstances of the O.J. Simpson trial to heighten events in the story?
4. In one instance, after an exchange with Kate, Daniel thinks,
“Wouldn't it be nice if Iris said biting and sophisticated things like that? But wit is not the source of Iris's allure. Hers is a different sort of grace, unadorned and total, the grace of the sea, the grace of angels, and sex.” How else are Iris and Kate different? Are they alike in any way?
5. "It strikes [Daniel] that all his life he has been in love with black women—Dinah Washington, Billie Holiday, Irma Thomas, Ivie Anderson, Ella Fitzgerald, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith. Is Iris's skin color part of the reason Daniel is attracted to her? What other motivations does Daniel have for entering into an affair with Iris? Kate believes Daniel "thinks a love affair will rescue him." Do you think she's right?
6. Describe Daniel's relationship with his parents. How have the circumstances of his upbringing influenced him as an adult? Discuss Daniel's relationship with Ruby.
7. None of the committed relationships in the story are happy, contented ones but rather filled with strife and unhappiness, including Hampton and Iris, Daniel and Kate, Ferguson and Susan, and even Daniel's parents. Discuss the significant aspects of each of these relationships.
What does this novel say, if anything, about marriage?
8. Early on in the story Daniel gives Mercy this advice: "You don't have anything to feel guilty about.You have a right to make yourself happy.
You're not obliged to stay where you're miserable." How does this
"advice" apply to him and his actions later in the story?
9. Discuss Daniel and Hampton's encounter in the woods while searching for Marie. Do you think Daniel intentionally aimed the flare at Hampton?
10.When Daniel experiences partial blindness, his doctor says to him,
"Guilt's a bitch." Daniel responds by saying, "I don't feel guilty.
How could I? I've turned a blind eye to everything." What do you make of this exchange? Is there any significant connection between Daniel's and Marie's blindness?
11.During Daniel's encounter with Susan at the bar, she says, "When do people around here start living up to their responsibilities? You'd think that almost killing a man would have brought you up short, but from what I hear you and Iris are still going at it hot and heavy….What gives you the right to cause so much damage, and to hurt people?" Is Susan justified in her criticism of Daniel, or is her own experience clouding her judgment? How does the relationship of Ferguson and Marie mirror that of Daniel and Iris?
12.Discuss the novel's ending. What do you think the future holds for Daniel and Iris? What about Kate?
Scott Spencer is the author of seven previous novels including
Endless Love
, which has sold more than two million copies. His other novels include
The Rich Man’s Table
,
Men in Black
, and
Walking
the Dead
, a film version of which was produced by Jodie Foster in 2000..
a l s o b y s c ot t s p e n c e r
Last Night at the Brain Thieves’ Ball
Preservation Hall
Endless Love
Waking the Dead
Secret Anniversaries
Men in Black
The Rich Man’s Table
P R A I S E
F O R
A Ship Made of Paper
“Scott Spencer is a magnificent writer.”
—Anne Tyler
“What makes this brave, dazzling novel so impossible to put down is the urgency with which it makes you care about what happens to its characters: male and female, black and white, young and old. Scott Spencer has a genius for observing dramatic everyday moments when the self crashes into the barriers of class and race and culture, together with infinite compassion for the wayward impulse that turns human beings into fanatics willing to sacrifice everything on the altar of romantic love.”
—Francine Prose
“This haunting, intelligent love story registers, with acute sensitivity to irony and politics, what is passionate, absurd, unsettled, and unsettling in romance and race in America’s middle class. This is Scott Spencer at his strongest.”
—Lorrie Moore
“
A Ship Made of Paper
is an engagingly written, wickedly insightful, and passionate novel about desire, race, and fate; it will surely find a wide and grateful audience.”
—Oscar Hijuelos
“Spencer’s latest novel should cement his reputation as the contemporary American master of the love story.” —
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
“The borders of Scott Spencer’s expertly portrayed Leyden are contigu-ous with Cheever country, to the south, and Updike country, to the northeast. Like John Cheever, Spencer has imagined for his suburban dreamers and infatuated lovers melodramatic crises that verge upon the surreal; like John Updike, Spencer is a poet-celebrant of Eros, lyrically precise in his descriptions of lovers’ fantasies, lovers’ lovemaking, lovers’ bodies.
A Ship Made of Paper
is a wild ride that lurches and swerves and floats.”
—Joyce Carol Oates,
The New Yorker
“With an outsize gift for getting inside his characters’ heads, Mr. Spencer deftly explores the racial issues from each perspective: slights real and imagined, misunderstandings, both the allure and strangeness, for Iris and Daniel, of interracial sex. But
A Ship Made of Paper
’s greatest strength is its evocation of infidelity, regardless of race, in small town America. . . .
Mr. Spencer’s prose is delicious, his characters fully formed and reso-nant, his simple story a rich delight.”
—New York Observer
“There are few novelists alive who use the English language as Scott Spencer does. . . . Every ache of feeling, every failed effort at restraint, every attempt at self-deception is captured in precise, beautifully cadenced prose, inflected with striking scenic detail and metaphor.”
—Wall Street Journal
“The mounting sense of doomed inevitability brings to mind Greek drama or opera, while there is something Shakespearean in Spencer’s use of natural elements to evoke passion and chaos. . . . And in a liter-ary environment in which few male writers can deliver a decent sex scene, much less offer a fully fleshed romance, Spencer can do both with ease.
—Washington Post Book World
“Deft, seductive . . . Mr. Spencer writes with a potent blend of elo-quence and wry acuity. And it roams through
A Ship Made of Paper
, too, galvanizing a familiar story of midlife-crisis infidelity into something much more inviting.”
—Janet Maslin,
New York Times
“A
Ship Made of Paper
, Spencer’s astonishing new novel, is the work of a meticulous, gifted writer whose characters are too inconveniently human for the slick redemptions of the big screen. Shrewd, compas-sionate, and unflinching, this new book takes a perilous journey that leaves readers stranded on the shoals with nothing for protection but their own flimsy, sinking beliefs about race and desire.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Spencer’s fine-tuned pacing keeps our hearts beating as fast as the lovers. His ear for dialogue is true. His keen insight into character brings each of these four into sharp, clear focus . . . The beauty of this novel lies not only in the telling but in its intelligence, humanity, and commitment to the passionate life.”
—Newsday
“Subtle without being obscure, a splendidly intricate tragicomedy of manners in the tradition of Saki—full of horrible, delightful, and vivid eccentrics.”
—Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)
Designed by Mia Risberg
Cover design by High Design, NYC
Cover illustration by John Lewis
“Just to Be with You” by Bernard Roth, Copyright © 1956
by Arc Music Corporation (BMI). Copyright renewed by Sunflower Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission. International copyright secured.
A SHIP MADE OF PAPER. Copyright © 2003 by Scott Spencer.
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