Two reasons many of us wait impatiently for a new Scott Spencer novel are his fine poet’s eye and his keen ear. His sublime sentences and lush sensory details, as well as his unparalleled talent for expressing complex interior states, make his books a particular pleasure for the reader seeking a truly immersive experience.

His newest novel, An Ocean Without a Shore (Ecco), a follow-up to River Under the Road (2017), is narrated by Christopher “Kip” Woods, a man tormented by unrequited love.  One of the novel’s most fateful moments is a violent incident Kip bears responsibility for, and a particularly damaging result is that he is convinced—with good reason—that it will strip him of the friendship he most values.  He is someone who has spent most of his life in denial about who he really is, and Spencer portrays Kip’s despair with an unflinching but sympathetic gaze. 

Spencer is perhaps best known for his seminal 1979 novel Endless Love, which has sold more than two million copies and was a finalist for the National Book Award, as was his 2003 novel, A Ship Made of Paper.  Other celebrated novels include Waking the Dead, Willing, The Rich Man’s Table, and Men in Black (no relation to the movie franchise).  

Spencer was raised in Chicago and currently resides in upstate New York. Christine Sneed conversed with Spencer about the writing of An Ocean Without a Shore for The National.

Q: When you started writing River Under the Road, the novel that precedes An Ocean Without a Shore, did you know it would be the first book in a trilogy or did this evolve as you wrote? 

A: When I began writing River Under the Road, I thought it would be one book.  Then I realized that if it was one book it might be a thousand pages, and I will never in my life write a book that long—and I am not exactly longing to read a book that long, much less copyedit, proofread, and make little last-minute revisions in a gargantuan novel.

I don't have the power of concentration or the unbridled energy of an Eleanor Catton or a William Vollman.  I stopped the first novel at what I thought was the right moment, and shortly after that started making notes on the next one. The difficulty, of course, was composing the second one so it would be completely independent from the first.  I think I was able to do that.   But a trilogy?  I'm not sure.  Right now, I want to go in a different direction—new people, new town, new me! 

Q: How did the structure of An Ocean Without a Shore come about?  It begins in the near present before looping back many years, ultimately returning to the near present.  

A: The structure never comes first for me.  First comes the urge, then the voice, then the obsession, and after those plates are spinning, I try to figure a way to have it make sense.  I want to turn those basically inchoate feelings into a novel that will have enough inner tension to keep me curious and engaged, and to keep me coming back to it, no matter how long it takes.  

For me, writing is a way of being alive and my urge toward writing is similar to how it feels when I want to be with loved and liked ones, or want to walk in the woods, or make a frittata.  These are the things that make life bearable. Writing, that aloneness, that belief in the novel and its craft—it's a natural state of being for me, and I only feel fully like myself (for what that's worth!) when I am engaged in writing.  Writers talk about the torment of composition, and there is that aspect to it, of course.  I'm not exempt from those trials—not by a long shot. There is, of course, misery involved.  But anything worth doing has a darker aspect, a painful component. No love without heartbreak, no life without death, etc., etc. 

Normally, when I begin to write, I can choose to write about anything or anyone.  In the case of An Ocean Without a Shore, however, my options were narrowed.  I wanted to continue with the characters from A River Under the Road, my previous novel.  That novel was written in what's now called the close third person, and I didn't want to do that again, not right away.  I like writing in the first person so I knew that the next book would be narrated by an "I."  As to who that would be, I wanted it to be someone who really loved the main character from the first book—because a lot of people who read it (not that a lot of people read it, but you know what I mean) didn't really like Thaddeus Kaufman.  To confront that, I used a narrator who not only liked him, but had always loved him, and desired him.  But—and I should have seen this coming—this person carrying the torch was more brightly lit, and he came to dominate the novel. I wanted him to be no more prominent in my novel than Nick Carraway was in Fitzgerald's.  But it didn't work out that way.   

Q:  Kip has been carrying a torch for decades for Thaddeus, whom he met in college.  Thwarted or unrequited love is one of your great subjects.  What is it about these unquenchable feelings that attract you as a novelist?  

A:  The easiest and most dramatic way to write about love is to write about its absence—about the death of a beloved, or rejection, or forced separation.  Or unrequited love, which was my choice.  You need something to overcome, unless you are writing some kind of mystical meditation on love.  When I struggle—emotionally, morally, physically, even financially—I find out a lot about who I am beneath the facade of my personality.  Same goes for characters in fiction.  The personality is a fascinating construction, entertaining and revealing, but I also like to get a good look at the source of that personality, the underlying character, the history, the wound.  

Q:  Leyden, the town in upstate New York where Thaddeus and his family live, is the setting of several of your novels.  Is Leyden based on one particular town along the Hudson River? Or is it an amalgam of various towns, e.g. Poughkeepsie, Staatsburg, and Rhinebeck? 

A: Leyden started for me in the early 1990s.  It began as a stand-in for Rhinebeck, New York, but over the years it's become less like Rhinebeck or any other “real town” I know, and more like itself.  And, yes, I want quotation marks around real town, because for me—never more so than during a pandemic, when all of us are living a lot inside of our imagination—Leyden is quite real.

Q:  Near the beginning of An Ocean Without a Shore there’s a harrowing scene on an Amtrak train heading from Manhattan to Leyden.  Large rocks are thrown at the train’s windows, and Kip soon learns from Thaddeus’s wife Grace that the rocks were likely thrown by angry residents of the small towns on the train line, and this is a frequent occurrence.  Have you experienced this yourself? And whether or not you did, was it one of the inspirations for this novel and A River Under the Road, which, among its other themes, explores social class and privilege? 

A: How do you write about our time here without giving serious thought to the class structures that restrain our lives?   In my novel, the rocks are imaginary, but the fury that inspired people to throw them is real. Here in the U.S., class has always been a mighty force, perhaps the most stubbornly insistent fact of our lives. That's the real Invisible Hand, isn't it?  In recent years, we have had an African American president, gay marriage, and legalized pot—all pipe dreams when I was young.  And it is so marvelous that these things have happened—I am thrilled to be able to witness these changes.  Yet at the same time, the gap—the treacherous, infested gulf—between the solvent and the insolvent has widened, and class divisions, rather than disappearing, are more striking than ever. 

Remember in our Civil War, the well-off paid the indigent to take their place when conscription was begun?  Well, we have roughly the same situation now where those with money pay—not directly but through taxes—the working class to fight and die for us.  And while we learned a lot about very prominent people getting sick during the Covid-19 pandemic, there was no getting around that it was overwhelmingly the poor and the forgotten who were dying.  It's another reminder: your place in the economic order is literally a matter of life and death.

Q:  I was fascinated by Kip’s work as a risk assessor for Adler Associates, a private Manhattan investment firm. What kind of research did you do to make the sections pertaining to his job so detailed? 

A:  A lot of work and revision went into shaping Kip's career—as well as the decor of his office, and the decorum of his co-workers.  I am acquainted with people who work in the money business, so I had that. But there was also other research I needed to do, and, as we know, research begets pages.  Which is to say, most of the big cuts I made in the fourth draft of this novel were scenes involving Kip's work life.   

Q: To put it mildly, Kip has been reluctant all his life to come out as a gay man.  Most, if not all, of your previous protagonists have been heterosexual. What inspired you to write from Kip’s point of view?  

A: I wanted the narrator of the novel to love Thaddeus.  Grace, his wife, was not a good candidate.  His parents weren't super-fond of him.  The person in the world who loved him most was Kip.  So the decision to make a man in love with another man the emotional center of the novel was actually secondary—and simple.  In Kip, I also wanted to explore what it was like to be more or less outside of the great movement toward freedom, and to be decent but not particularly brave.  Similar to people whose political life is primarily signing petitions or making donations.

Q: Emma, Thaddeus and Grace’s daughter, who shares a poignant scene with Kip near the end of the novel, is, in a way, the most sensible person in the Kaufman family, and possibly in the entire book.  Will we see more of her in the trilogy’s third novel? 

A: Thank you for liking Emma.  When she sings to Kip—well, it's my favorite page of the book!  That's partly why, near the end, I peek in on her again when she starts college.  I suppose Emma has the purest heart of any of the main characters—maybe Muriel is close, but she's quite secretive. 

I doubt Emma will remain as pure of heart if I continue to write about her, however.  I try to make a realistic world when I write, and the longer you are in the world—whether you are flesh and blood or not—the more you are going to be altered, radically altered, and not always for the better.

Christine Sneed is the author of the novels Paris, He Said and Little Known Facts, and the story collections Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry and The Virginity of Famous Men.  Her stories and essays have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, New England Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, and a number of other periodicals. She has received the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, the Society of Midland Authors Award, the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, and has twice won the Book of the Year Award from the Chicago Writers Association. She has also been a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. She lives in Pasadena, California.