A lyrical writer muddles through a long strange trip of a novel

Scott Spencer places a faltering middle-age writer at the center of his new novel. (Marion Ettlinger)

Willing
By Scott Spencer
Ecco, 256 pp., $24.95

Many great novels are spirited with pleasurable strangeness, whether in a classic like Knut Hamsun's "Hunger," or something edgily contemporary like Brock Clarke's recent celebrated work, "An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England." Yet these novels are to be distinguished from a more common appearance, those that tip the bucket into a well of befuddled narrative weirdness. Unfortunately, Scott Spencer's latest, "Willing," is often wet with it - weirdness running off-kilter and dissonant.

Contrarians that many novel-readers consider themselves, one may be tempted by an advance précis of "Willing." A faltering middle-age freelance writer, Avery, gets his heart broken by his younger grad student girlfriend, upon which the writer's uncle folds him into an international sex tour package. Sensitive artiste, traveling large and immoral with a gang of rich American businessmen? Globe-trotting guys gone wild? It's a scenario ripe for satire, for pathos, for a good novelist's roving, human-nature plundering eye.

And with Scott Spencer - a National Book Award nominee - one certainly does not suffer at the hands of an incapable writer. Far from it. He's one lyrically smart dude, with evidence to be found on just about every page of "Willing." Very often his sentences are surprising, rhythmic, psychologically astute, and on occasion richly comic. For example, describing one of the prostitutes his protagonist encounters, Spencer writes: "There was something transparent in her, plain, but a plainness that was alluring, the plainness of something unmarked, undiscovered, a stoical, pioneer plainness." Or: "Despite her thinness, she moved with a stolid determination, swaying from side to side, as if she learned to walk in a bog." Here and often his sentences can turn positively Updikean. In those places Spencer pushes the prose playfully - even strangely - a reader can be stopped in his tracks, halted by a crazily perfect turn of phrase. As when the first-person narrator considers his sexual performance, in particular how this prostitute knows "a lot more about me - animal me, faintly girly me, wounded me, bury my heart at wounded me - than most of the people with whom I supposedly had decent relationships could be said to know." Right on! Bizarreness (and buyable truth) delivered with panache.

Yet even as you're relishing Spencer's words tapped into snug and glittering place, the larger plot machinery comes up in the road like sculpture fallen from a speeding truck. Are we really expected to believe that the narrator gets hit by a car on the way to visiting his first escort, in turn entangling his estranged mother into the (capital "P") Plot? Or that this same mother has had four husbands, with Avery swapping out his surname after each new divorce? Or that his long-absent mother would decide suddenly to chase him down as he carnivorously cavorts the continent? Or that the threat of violence would adhere to these heavily-sugared johns in each and every successive, quiet-tempered, Nordic clime?

What is this?, you get to regularly asking. If nothing else: weirdness in all the wrong places. A novelistic frame out of whack, like a circus mirror that queers in amusingly zany but problematic directions. How much more pleasurable and revealing it would have been to read about the moral predilection and sordid strangeness (yes) that one encounters when they leave these shores and buy into the belief that what happens outside America stays outside America.

Literary sex, and especially bad literary sex, has the capacity to uncover character and send a reader nosing into the dark and dirty and compelling corners in which the human animal sometimes crawls. Think Philip Roth or Henry Miller or Milan Kundera, where the erotic is shot with traces of revealing, convincing strangeness. In the midst of "Willing," the reader wants to yell: Do over! And: please Mr. Spencer, return to your writing table, shake off the bizarro plot, and deliver us the real trip inward.

Ted Weesner Jr. is a writer living in Somerville.