An Ocean Without a Shore

April 1, 2020
The romantic obsession hidden beneath the surface of his closest male friendship warps the life of a seemingly straight, supersuccessful financier. Spencer continues to mine the dramatic possibilities of his fictional Hudson Valley town of Leyden; the current book is a sequel to River Under the Road (2017), including most of the characters. Back in the 1970s, Kip Woods was Thaddeus Kaufman and Grace Cornell's druggie New York friend with a job at EF Hutton. He's still in finance, making really big bucks at a high-end investment firm; his persona is now more The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit than Bright Lights, Big City. However, Grace's suspicion, never officially confirmed, that he was "queer" turns out to be on the money. Kip has been secretly in love with Thaddeus since their college days in Ann Arbor, so when Thaddeus calls for help early one morning in 1997, Kip is there in a heartbeat. Back when Thaddeus' screenwriting career was flying high in the early '80s, he bought an estate in Leyden called Orkney. But "houses like that are like dope habits--they only get more and more expensive," and meanwhile, Thaddeus' career has tanked completely. How can Kip help his friend? The first suggestion is that he buy a little piece of Orkney and hold it until Thaddeus can raise the scratch to buy it back. After that fails to fix everything, a much more problematic idea is vaunted. A character who understands the true dynamic of the friendship tells Kip flat-out in Chapter 3, "He will destroy you." Dum-dum-dum. While it's not hard to imagine Kip hiding his crush on Thaddeus for decades, it's a struggle to accept his completely closeted, self-hating persona--he seems to be from a slightly earlier era. But you'll stick around for gems like these: "The spurned lover has only been rejected by one, maybe two people. The spurned artist has been rejected by the world." "Infidelity is an avenue to adventure available to all, rich and poor...anyone who feels crushed by the dailiness of settled life, anyone who needs a window in a life that suddenly seems all walls." "I can only tell you what you already know: ego is the sworn enemy of happiness." Spencer's writing is always a pleasure.

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April 13, 2020
Spencer returns to the characters from River Under the Road in this unsatisfying sequel about unrequited love and betrayal. Kip Woods, a supporting character in River, provides a first-person confession as he awaits sentencing for a criminal conviction. His criminal actions, which are revealed at the end, are motivated by his long-secret love for the now broke but once famous screenwriter Thaddeus Kaufman. Whenever Thaddeus needs Kip to do something for him—buy his land to avoid foreclosure, care for his daughter Emma, or provide Thaddeus with insider stock tips—Kip is eager to help. Spencer makes Kip’s codependent devotion to Thaddeus as palpable as Kip’s struggles with his romantic feelings (“If love is a sinking ship, you do want to go down with it”). The men’s bromantic chats are engaging highlights, especially when Thaddeus toys with Kip by suggesting they hike the Appalachain Trail together (“Just to be two creatures in the great outdoors. I think that would be amazing”), and they show how Kip endures Thaddeus despite his increasingly odious behavior. While the narrative gets disjointed when Spencer shifts away from Kip, such as a depiction of Thaddeus in crisis when his father dies, the climax between the two friends is heartbreaking and explosive. Still, Spencer boxes Kip into a corner that feels disappointingly contrived.

April 15, 2020
Unrequited desire festers for decades, but it's money that ultimately destroys a gay man's relationship with his straight best friend. Kip has been in love with Thaddeus since college and has always dropped everything whenever his mostly oblivious buddy needed something. But while Kip has found stability and relative affluence as an investment adviser, Thaddeus' writing career has stalled, and the once-stately Hudson Valley property that saved his marriage to Grace has become an expensive encumbrance. Financial desperation opens a door for Kip but has also corroded away much of what made Thaddeus so alluring. This is a companion piece, if not quite a sequel, to River under the Road (2017), in which Spencer examined artistic decadence and class tension between Thaddeus and his rural neighbors. Both novels lament money's ability to distort interpersonal interactions. But as demonstrated early on in Endless Love (1979), Spencer has a gift for depicting the ecstasies and torments of romantic love with crisp detail and deliberate restraint, and it is this quality, together with Kip's haunted narrative voice, that give this tale special resonance.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2020

The author of Endless Love unfolds the story of luckless Kip Woods, who's been bearing a torch for Thaddeus Kaufman since college days. But Thaddeus, now a family man struggling with his career, seems never to have noticed, and Kip must decide whether he should continue to dedicate his life to what is apparently a lost cause. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

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