APPEARANCES DECEIVE
in Spencer’s “Veneer”
BY CHRIS EDMONDS INDEPENDENT WRITER

Spencer: “My take on the world is that you have people who try to mimic the world and you get this mimetic realism where people are saying that this is as close to real life as I can make it in a book,” COURTESY OF JILL SANDOLE

The fog that fell with a dud in chapter one burned off

Friday morning as first-time fiction writer Andrew Spencer reclined in a plastic deck chair, left ankle on right knee, to wax about his murder-mystery “Veneer,” the craft of writing and, of course, Nantucket. He drew the admittedly imperfect comparison of the work’s gestation to childbirth, with the post-partem world now more confounding for the island resi-dent.

“You’re really excited to see it exist because all the work you’ve done comes to fruition,” he said of the book available at island shops. “At the same time, you’re left with, ‘Oh God, what do I do now?’”

For the present, Spencer is making the rounds promoting the book, with a recent signing at Brant Point Books, a television appearance and a question-and-answer with a local book club. He is also recovering from a “binge and purge” writing process that saw Spencer work in spurts over a four-year period.

In keeping with the childbirth metaphor, Spencer recalled the work’s “birthday” as Feb. 2, 2000, the day that then Presidential hope-ful George W. Bush spoke at the uber-conservative Bob Jones University in South Carolina. While Bush caught flack for the appearance at the school that outlawed interracial and same-sex dating, Spencer had the epiphany that catalyzed his future novel: What if George W. Bush had a gay son who came out that day?

After toying with the notion over the next year, Spencer eventually tore through the first draft — about 280 manuscript pages — in a matter of months. He left the manuscript, only to return to it sporadically, fleshing its bones and gradually pro-ducing a second draft of nearly 400 manuscript pages.

That process conveyed the fledging fictioneer to that delicate habitude of the author where the open-ing and closing of the work may be envisioned, but what occurs in the work’s guts remains a mystery.

“With this, I knew where it was going to start and where it was going to end, but I had no idea what was going to happen between those two places,” said Spencer.

What happens, in short, is the murder of a summer resi-dent, a faulty investigation by

local authorities and a family

intrigue that slowly produces the truth behind a sequence of shields, a Russian nesting doll effect where appearances are not to be trusted. It is a critique in fiction that Spencer extends to Nantucket, a seemingly idyllic retreat for seemingly idyllic persons and families, but one rife with its own problems and ills.

“There is an accepted image of what Nantucket is: it’s lightship baskets, it’s whaling, it’s ‘Moby Dick,’ it’s the Essex, it’s Nat Philbrick, it’s sailing – it’s that whole old maritime thing,” said Spencer. “Once you get here, you discover that Nantucket has a lot of things going on that we don’t talk about. We don’t talk about substance abuse on the island. We don’t talk about domestic violence on the island. We don’t talk about things that don’t fit with ‘Moby Dick.’”

Not to take shots at Melville, Spencer crafted “Veneer” as a social commentary, not a diatribe against the island and its denizens, be they perma-nent or transitory. In so doing, Spencer joins a long line of other, so-called “thriller” writers, who through popular fiction offer critical assessments of their given society.

Particularly, Spencer incorporates a great deal of scriptural references into the fabric of the work, a product he said of his living in Hewitt, Texas during the early phases of the book’s evolution.

“Texas is a conservative state; this is a conser-vative part of Texas,” said Spencer of the Bible Belt Buckle town. That the victim’s family makes its home in Waco, Texas, a place inseparable from connotations of religious zeal gone awry, was intentional on Spencer’s part, as he “highlighted the shortcoming of religion” in the work.

“Religion, to me, is not so much about salva-tion,” said Spencer, who described himself as “peripherally” religious. “It’s more a code of con-duct – call it the Boy Scout Law, call it Emily Post, whatever.”

Biblical literalism, especially with respect to homosexuality, underpins much of the work, cre-ating conflict on all levels of the work’s facades. It serves as the chief mechanism of critique for Spencer, who worked out of that original, defining query after Bush’s Bob Jones appearance: “What if…”

Readers will not have to wonder “what if” Spencer writes a sequel, as he said a follow-up is not in the works, nor will it be.

“I don’t like sequels,” he said. “For me, it’s not the thing to do. My mind doesn’t think like that. I don’t want to have to keep track of all these char-acters.”

A second attempt at fiction is, however, in the future plans for the writer. Although he begrudg-ingly referred to the venture as “experimental,” Spencer said that the current undertaking will be a complete departure from “Veneeer.” Rather than keep with the rubric of the murder-mystery, he has taken on instead the charge to produce a realistic realism on the pages of a book.

“My take on the world is that you have people who try to mimic the world and you get this mimetic realism where people are saying that this is as close to real life as I can make it in a book,” he said. “But real life doesn’t involve comments like ‘He said, sarcastically’ or ‘He thought to him-self.’ It’s just people talking: life is composed of conversation.”

And with “Veneer” now available for general consumption, some of that conversation is now Spencer’s.

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