Willing
By Scott Spencer
256 pages. Ecco.

Emasculated by an unfaithful girlfriend and uncertain whether love and romance are worth the price of a condom anymore, the hero of Scott Spencer's ninth novel, Willing (Ecco), a middle-aged writer named Avery Jankowsky, is urged by a sensualist rich uncle to embark on a prepaid international sex tour. The goal is to reawaken his carnal self and enjoy the polymorphous pleasures that most middle-class American men can only dream of while surfing the Internet after their wives and kids have gone to bed. Costing over $100,000, the trip is no degrading, illicit crawl though the usual southeast Asian dives but a full-amenities grand romp of global female pulchritude. And though Avery vows at the outset to keep his emotional distance from the women he meets, detachment soon becomes impossible.