In Waking The Dead and Endless Love author Scott Spencer's new novel A Ship Made Of Paper, an unexpected October snow falls with apocalyptic force on the town of Leyden, New York, destroying much but blanketing more in a shelter that's simultaneously impenetrable and impermanent. A Hudson river town, Leyden is home to writers, a small college, an unofficial aristocracy that stretches back centuries, and, for the two couples at the story's center, countless unexplored pockets of tension and need. Returning to his childhood home after the threats following his failed defense of a drug dealer left him fearing every black person in sight, lawyer Daniel Emerson also finds the town a source of unexpected passion. Expecting little from life but a quiet practice and domestic predictability, he finds himself irresistibly (and eventually obsessively) drawn to Iris Davenport, a married black graduate student whose son shares a daycare with the daughter of Daniel's girlfriend Kate, an acerbic writer grateful for Leyden's peace and quiet. The affair that follows, initiated under the snowfall and carried on under the town's watchful eyes, shocks Kate as much as it shocks Iris' city-dwelling husband Hampton, a man whose every action comes freighted with the need to uphold a long family tradition of black achievement. All this plays out against the backdrop of the O.J. Simpson trial, an event that's caused Kate to put her second novel on the back burner as she churns out one vitriolic article after another. The contrivance threatens to put too fine a point on Ship's capital-T themes—or it would if Spencer didn't handle his story with expert delicacy, shifting attention from one character to the next without lauding or condemning. Spencer excels at something that's nearly impossible in any medium but a novel: He looks beneath the surface for the tangled motives that make things happen, from infidelities to offhand dinner remarks. Spencer gives his characters fractal-like psychologies, and the most minute layers are every bit as complicated as the most visible. He does right by the themes at play, too. Approaching his affair with Iris, Daniel thinks, "History in one corner and Love in the other? Fine. Ring the bell. Let the fight begin." What follows may prove Daniel naïve, and more selfish than he realizes, but it doesn't prove him a fool. Spencer knows better than to expect a first-round knockout in the struggle between history and love, but he at least keeps a watchful optimism at A Ship Made Of Paper's center.