LOVE CRAZY.("A Ship Made of Paper")(Book Review)

Idealism, hubris, and hypomania in about equal measure characterize the thirty-six-year-old protagonist of Scott Spencer's new novel, "A Ship Made of Paper" (Ecco; $24.95), who embarks upon a reckless love affair with a young wife and mother:

History in one corner and Love in the other? Fine. Ring the bell. Let the fight begin. Love, he thinks, will bring history to its knees.

By "history," Daniel Emerson means the rift between the races--he is white, and she is black--which is a consequence of slavery in America; by "love" he means the intensity of the passion he feels for Iris Davenport, no matter what the consequences for others.

The funny-romantic boast of the bluesy song "Just to Be with You" ("On a ship that's made of paper / I would sail the seven seas") is the unspoken mantra of mock-heroic Daniel Emerson, whose romantic yearnings precipitate a Grand Guignol of seriocomic happenings. Daniel, who has moved back to the place of his birth--the fictitious Hudson Valley town of Leyden, New York--is a richly drawn character, alternately exasperating and appealing, a good-natured, tirelessly smiling, and affable adult with the emotional needs of a child. His transcendental yearnings, if not his intellectual capacities, are of the scale of Ralph Waldo Emerson's. Daniel will remind some readers of those hapless characters in Iris Murdoch's novels who fall in love--blissfully and brainlessly--with strikingly emblematic individuals whom they scarcely know. In Daniel's case, the object of his infatuation is a newcomer to Leyden and one of very few African-Americans in the area. She is a part-time graduate student in American studies who brings her four-year-old son to the same day-care center where Daniel brings his partner's four-year-old daughter. Daniel, having "all his life . . . been in love with black women--Dinah Washington, Billie Holiday, Irma Thomas, Ivie Anderson, Ella Fitzgerald, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith," quickly seduces Iris, who feels underappreciated in her marriage to an ambitious Wall Street investment banker and who has doubts about her own intelligence and worth. "If there's no one around," Iris says, "I just say what I'm thinking . . . 'I'm in love. I'm in love with a man who thinks I'm smart and beautiful.' "

The borders of Scott Spencer's expertly portrayed Leyden (the author lives in Rhinebeck) are contiguous 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. Spencer is neither as playfully sadistic with his characters nor as magical in his prose as Cheever, and his writerly skills are perhaps less dazzling than Updike's, but his narrative voice is zestful and unpredictable. "A Ship Made of Paper" is a wild ride that lurches and swerves and floats. There is an inspired three-page threnody that begins, "It was snowing and it was snowing and it was going to snow some more," and contains a concatenation of weather-related mishaps that might have been illustrated by Edward Gorey. There is a grotesquely protracted interlude in a dense woods in which Daniel and Hampton, Iris's cuckolded husband--thrown together as a pair in a quixotic search for a runaway blind girl--wander about lost, and discover how much they dislike each other ("Daniel?" "What?" "Can I make a suggestion?" "Sure. What?" "Go fuck yourself"), all culminating in an accident caused by Daniel's carelessness which leaves Hampton a permanent invalid. And there are, scattered through the novel, outbursts of slightly deranged rapture from Daniel's perspective, such as these (fortunately ...