Total Eclipse of the Heart

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For all its considerable pain, in places Spencer's book is an improbable comedy. (Daniel's parents are remote Wasps who drop by one day to tell him they are leaving all their money to a local raptor-preservation society.) And in the unraveling fabric of his life, Daniel's blindness to his own predicaments is a lightly stitched comic thread. He's an intelligent man, but in matters of the heart, he has a muscular stupidity that gives him the strength to go on.

Even after he has dynamited his life, he can't resist the temptation to bounce the rubble, which leads to an unbearable episode that mixes a loaded gun and young children left without adult supervision. But at the mercy of their longings, Spencer's adults are unsupervised too. It falls to Kate to voice the suspicion that love may be "the firings of the foulest, most primitive part of the back brain." It falls to us to look on in wonder at the damage done.

Spencer writes the way Daniel loves--wholeheartedly, with a superabundance of energy. If there's a fulsome side to his gift--he doesn't hesitate to produce a line like "He wants to hold her in the moonlight"--it's a small price to pay for the complicated pleasures of a book in which love not only conquers all but also imposes victor's terms. Spencer is like that waterfall on the cover. He may produce a bit of gush, but in what he does there is a power of the kind that spins turbines.