Ambitions Waking the Dead

By Paul Gray

Endless Love, Scott Spencer's third novel, produced the stuff of most writers' daydreams. Although not all reviewers loved its explicit portrayal of obsessive passion, the book sold well, developed a cult following among young people and some of their elders, and in 1981 was made into a bad but attention-getting movie starring Brooke Shields. Such pleasurable success also breeds pressure. Endless Love was not, as publishers like to announce, long awaited. Waking the Dead is.

To his credit, Spencer has not been content simply to repeat himself. True, a spooky erotic attachment threads its way through this tale. Narrator Fielding Pierce, 34, has trouble forgetting his girlfriend Sarah Williams, who was blown up by a car bomb nearly five years earlier while driving in Minneapolis with some Chilean refugees. In those days, Pierce was a University of Chicago law student who harbored political ambitions. Now he is a prosecutor in the Cook County D.A.'s office and has been offered the Democratic machine's support for an Illinois congressional seat. Isaac Green, his influential mentor, gives him a pep talk: "You'll shine amongst them, Fielding. Shine. Your honesty. Your toughness. Your respect for decency and enduring values."

There are comments Green could add ("Your overweening self-pity. Your penchant for purple prose"). When Pierce flies back to New York for a Christmas visit with his family, he is secretly affronted by their pride in him: "I had been waiting all my life for a moment I realized now would never come--the time it would be my turn to be seen as I truly was." He glances at the holiday turkey, "which was draped in a butter-soaked dish towel and sat on the oven rack like a Latin American dictator in a sauna."

The author may realize what a jerk Fielding Pierce really is, but it is difficult to tell, since the snake has all the lines. Further muddying the issue of whether a character like this should be a Congressman is the reappearance of Sarah Williams, who, dead or alive, certainly comes to haunt the candidate. Spencer, 40, struggles with an ambitious question: How can people work for good in a world of evil? Unfortunately, with friends like Fielding and Sarah, the causes of righteousness and coherent narratives seem curiously irrelevant.