Scott Spencer's new novel, Willing, explores one man's erotic quest to find meaning in odd couplings and uncomfortably close encounters
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.
Printed from Oprah.com on Saturday, May 26, 2012
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