JULY 2020 - AudioFile
Narrator Will Damron was paired with author Scott Spencer for Spencer’s best-known novel, ENDLESS LOVE. Damron is a prolific and versatile performer who is also reliably steady and consistent. He demonstrates the balance of qualities necessary for this particular novelist and this particular novel, both of which would be easy to overplay. Spencer is an eloquent prose stylist, unsurpassed in capturing romantic longing and rapture, and especially adept in the use of figurative language. Here the story thread is a gay man’s lifelong passion for his straight friend, a situation essentially frustrating and difficult to externalize but performed here with conviction, energy, and restraint. This is a rather joyless book, but Spencer’s prose makes it stimulating listening for its descriptions alone. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
04/13/2020
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. (June)
From the Publisher
"Love hurts, power corrupts, and money makes the world go round, but it takes a first-rate artist to say something new and final about all three. In An Ocean Without A Shore, Scott Spencer proves just that. A fierce observer with the soul of a romantic, he knows what matters most: that our folly, put on display, should wreck, ravish, engulf us." — Joshua Ferris
“In elegantly turned phrases and brilliantly nuanced dialogue, Scott Spencer has populated ‘An Ocean without a Shore’ with fully formed, complex, deeply sympathetic characters, each of whom shines a dazzling light on what men and women will do in the name of love.” — Francine Prose
"An Ocean Without a Shore is a classic Scott Spencer novel: as always, he writes masterfully on the pain of longing and traces, with exacting detail, the hidden forces that animate his character's lives. Spencer is one of my very favorite writers, and this is a wonderful book." — Emma Cline
"Spencer’s writing is always a pleasure." — Kirkus Reviews
"If you entertain any doubts about love’s capacity to lacerate us, to transfigure us, to redeem us even as it crushes us, Scott Spencer’s An Ocean Without a Shore will put those doubts to rest. It’s a harrowing, insidiously gorgeous, entirely remarkable novel."
— Michael Cunningham
"Brutal, romantic and totally absorbing, An Ocean Without a Shore is about people you thought you knew, people who, it turns out, you didn't know at all. Spencer is masterful at describing the way side-lined passion can grow huge, anguished and absolutely essential." — Mary Gaitskill
"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." — Booklist
Mary Gaitskill
"Brutal, romantic and totally absorbing, An Ocean Without a Shore is about people you thought you knew, people who, it turns out, you didn't know at all. Spencer is masterful at describing the way side-lined passion can grow huge, anguished and absolutely essential."
Francine Prose
In elegantly turned phrases and brilliantly nuanced dialogue, Scott Spencer has populated ‘An Ocean without a Shore’ with fully formed, complex, deeply sympathetic characters, each of whom shines a dazzling light on what men and women will do in the name of love.”
Joshua Ferris
"Love hurts, power corrupts, and money makes the world go round, but it takes a first-rate artist to say something new and final about all three. In An Ocean Without A Shore, Scott Spencer proves just that. A fierce observer with the soul of a romantic, he knows what matters most: that our folly, put on display, should wreck, ravish, engulf us."
Emma Cline
"An Ocean Without a Shore is a classic Scott Spencer novel: as always, he writes masterfully on the pain of longing and traces, with exacting detail, the hidden forces that animate his character's lives. Spencer is one of my very favorite writers, and this is a wonderful book."
Booklist
"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."
Michael Cunningham
"If you entertain any doubts about love’s capacity to lacerate us, to transfigure us, to redeem us even as it crushes us, Scott Spencer’s An Ocean Without a Shore will put those doubts to rest. It’s a harrowing, insidiously gorgeous, entirely remarkable novel."
Booklist
"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."
Joshua Ferris
"Love hurts, power corrupts, and money makes the world go round, but it takes a first-rate artist to say something new and final about all three. In An Ocean Without A Shore, Scott Spencer proves just that. A fierce observer with the soul of a romantic, he knows what matters most: that our folly, put on display, should wreck, ravish, engulf us."
Emma Cline
"Ocean Without a Shore is a classic Scott Spencer novel: as always, he writes masterfully on the pain of longing and traces, with exacting detail, the hidden forces that animate his character's lives. Spencer is one of my very favorite writers, and this is a wonderful book."
JULY 2020 - AudioFile
Narrator Will Damron was paired with author Scott Spencer for Spencer’s best-known novel, ENDLESS LOVE. Damron is a prolific and versatile performer who is also reliably steady and consistent. He demonstrates the balance of qualities necessary for this particular novelist and this particular novel, both of which would be easy to overplay. Spencer is an eloquent prose stylist, unsurpassed in capturing romantic longing and rapture, and especially adept in the use of figurative language. Here the story thread is a gay man’s lifelong passion for his straight friend, a situation essentially frustrating and difficult to externalize but performed here with conviction, energy, and restraint. This is a rather joyless book, but Spencer’s prose makes it stimulating listening for its descriptions alone. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2020-03-15
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.
