Willing

Booklist

"Spencer writes of passion with precision and candor…buoyantly funny...immensely moving."

Publishers Weekly

In Spencer's (Endless Love) witty and perceptive latest, struggling New York writer Avery Jankowsky has a midlife crisis at 37. Weary of his hand-to-mouth existence and obsessed with never being able to afford to buy an apartment, Avery's anxiety intensifies when he discovers that his younger girlfriend, Deirdre, has been unfaithful. His Uncle Ezra offers to help him get back on track by sending him on a high-end sex tour that includes stops in Reykjavik and Oslo, and Avery gets his big idea: write a book about the experience. One fat advance later, his life would seem golden, but Avery has not reckoned with the complex personalities of the men he is traveling with nor with the long-buried conflicts within himself that come bubbling to the surface as the tour goes on. Although some of the plot isn't entirely convincing, the details from moment to moment are rich, captivating and often hilarious, and the description of Reykjavik's atmosphere dead-on. There's not enough plot for a great novel, but Avery is intensely self-aware and intoxicatingly articulate even when his feelings (and actions) are less than savory. (Mar.)

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Library Journal

Titillating jacket copy about journeying into the unsavory world of international sex tourism aside, this new novel by National Book Award finalist Spencer (A Ship Made of Paper) is more of a journey into the unsavory mind of Avery Jankowsky, freelance writer and average-guy narrator of the story. Half-crazy over ex-girlfriend Deirdre's infidelity and desperate to leave their shared apartment, Avery is on a round-the-world sex tour to take sneaky notes and write a tell-all book. The huge advance will net him the New York City apartment he covets, but he has to appear to be a willing (and randy) male member of his tour group while maintaining his objectivity and high-minded disdain for sex with high-class whores. Also still clinging to the moral high ground with Deirdre, refusing to see where things went wrong, Avery presents a face as false as the names of the women he meets in hotel rooms across Scandinavia. Packing a one-two punch of ruthless self-examination and tragicomic farce, this short novel is recommended for most fiction collections.
—Laurie A. Cavanaugh

Kirkus Reviews

After a strong beginning, this novel about a writer on an international sex tour doesn't show much staying power. Spencer has long specialized in inspired novelistic setups (A Ship Made of Paper, 2003, etc.), but rarely has he seemed to have more fun than he does here with the introduction of his first-person protagonist. Though scuffling freelancer Avery Jankowsky has traces of Bellow's Augie March and Roth's Portnoy in his voice, he's as unlucky in his career as he is in romance. It seems he only has one real story to tell: that of his mother's four marriages, which resulted in her son's four successive surnames. He quickly runs out of steam with his potential lovers-perhaps it's his fatalistic attitude toward his younger girlfriends that chases them away. Following the confession by his latest that she has been having an affair with a brutish Russian, he finds himself, through an improbable coincidence, booked onto what is supposed to be a first-class sex tour-through Scandinavia rather than the more child-exploitive Southeast Asia. The tour comprises the novel's second and lesser half, as Spencer introduces so many characters that the reader has trouble keeping them straight, and Spencer (or Jankowsky) proves squeamish at writing about actual sex. What is billed as a fantasy excursion seems more like a farce, one that has the narrator waxing philosophic about his noble instincts and his animal nature, his struggle with good and evil (or at least bad) and his loss of the ability to make "the distinction between what was naughty and what was despicable." Spencer makes potentially transgressive fare seem pedestrian, with the novel meandering its way toward a finale that feels abrupt andarbitrary-as foreplay ultimately leads to an anticlimax. Against all expectation, considering the subject matter, Jankowsky is a more interesting character than the novel in which he finds himself.

The Barnes & Noble Review

I'm not sure I have ever been able to turn away from the sight of a naked woman, Avery Jankowski observes in the opening pages of Willing, Scott Spencer's uproariously funny, unexpectedly moving novel about a freelance writer who decides to recover from a failed relationship by embarking on an upscale, all-expenses-paid sex tour. Neither has the author: Spencer's great subject has always been doomed, obsessive love and the intimate intricacies of the war between the sexes. Disconcertingly, given the modernity of his fictional world, he has the emotional range of the great 19th-century novelists (then again, as the British critic Martin Green once observed, to general consternation, the universe of the Glass family living room in Franny and Zooey is as psychologically capacious as that of Anna Karenina). It's one of the great ironies of modern literary history that Endless Love, Spencer's incandescent account of young love gone ineradicably wrong, is now chiefly remembered as the source of a ridiculous Franco Zeffirelli movie and an equally risible Lionel Richie song. To his credit, Spencer, whose midwestern sense of proportion leavens his characters' passionate intensity, seems to be in on the joke.

In Willing, Jankowski listens to the confession of his lover Deirdre's infidelity in disbelief, eventually giving back as good as he gets. "I believed what Freud said about the two things you need for happiness, Love and Work," he writes, "Now that the former had let me down, I doubly committed myself to the latter...."

I sent my agent, Andrew Post, a flurry of pitches, or pitches for pitches, most of them, I see now, insane and unsellable.... For instance, I proposed writing a piece called "Stalking," in which I would "assume the identity" of someone obsessively following someone, say, a woman, say, just for the sake of illustration, a woman with whom the writer is or has been involved, and what it is like to trail after her.

When his uncle proposes the freebie "Lamborghini of sex tours" -- organized by a business partner who owes him a favor -- Jankowski, alert to the financial opportunity it presents as a potential book subject, jumps at the chance. The conflict between writing for love or lucre is one of the many subjects Spencer has addressed expertly. His 1995 novel, Men in Black, is an account of the adventures his narrator undergoes after a cut-and-paste book about extraterrestrials he pseudonymously writes becomes an unexpected -- and unwelcome -- bestseller. Willing satirizes the same sorts of Grub Street pressures: "I wasn't vain about my writing," Jankowsky allows. "I was perfectly aware that I was not writing The Odyssey or the Bill of Rights, and above all, I did not forget that everything you write for a newspaper or magazine ends up at the bottom of some poor canary's cage. I knew where the caged bird craps."

He greets the admission of an affair by Deirdre, a graduate student of Russian history, with a younger man named Osip with growing, deadpan dismay. "I admit I made a mistake, she said.... I was so curious, all these years, studying Russia and I had never really known a Russian. It really will never happen again. How do I know that? I said. What if you meet some other type of man you haven't had intimate knowledge of? What if you meet a Tibetan or some great Patagonian guy? But it's my major, she said, her voice rising plaintively, as if I were unreasonably withholding my compassion."

Although he successfully auctions the rights to the sex tour tome for a cool $400,000, it comes as no surprise that the trip is a disaster or that Jankowsky's scruples about remaining an observer, and not becoming a participant, go quickly by the wayside. Despite this, Spencer manages to skirt (barely) the misogynistic potential of the material; his narrator is keenly aware of the absurdity, as well as the misery, of his complicity in the situation. "A man without a woman is a wretched thing," Jankowski admits.

While Willing is essentially a comic novel -- none of the characters, male or female, have the kind of emotional complexity exhibited by the members of the love triangle at the center of Spencer's last novel, A Ship Made of Paper, it has an emotional honesty of its own, as illustrated in this passage describing Jankowsky's awkward first encounter with Ingrid, a Reykjavik hooker: "There were the lies you told yourself to trick someone out of that which they would not give you under other circumstances and then there was this, the lies you told with the understanding that they would not be believed, the lies you agreed to tell, and the lies you agreed to hear. All that decency demanded was staying in character."

Jankowsky does his best to stay decent despite his indecent, bereft circumstances. As in Spencer's other fiction, sex is the raw material his protagonists use to tap into their essential natures, above and beyond the insoluble dilemmas of the world. "I believe in my desire," Jankowsky tells his mother, when she tracks him down in the middle of his tour, to confront him about what the hell he is doing. But he knows that desire alone is not enough, and that knowledge is the heart that beats beneath the artifice of Scott Spencer's considerable art. --Paul Wilner

A member of the National Book Critics Circle, Paul Wilner is a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times book review sections, the online magazine obit-mag.com, Publishers Weekly, and the New York Times "Arts and Leisure" section, among other publications.