Endless Love

I sat at my window now in a state of terror and the terror would not recede. I stared down at Ellis Avenue until it was blurry. I simply could not imagine setting foot on the street below. Two professorial-looking men walked by, one swinging an unopened black umbrella, the other with a raincoat hooked onto a finger and slung over his shoulder, like a TV star. People and their lives. People and their pictures of themselves. It was astounding and it gave me motion sickness to think of it. How could I ever find a place among them and how could I ever learn to want to?

I was too young to see Endless Love when it was first released, and so I've had only the vague idea that it was a sexy movie about being in love with Brooke Shields. Scott show more Spencer's 1979 novel is not that, nor is it much like the movie, which I watched after I had read the book.

During his senior year of high school, David Axelrod meets and falls in love with Jade Butterfield, who is a year younger than he is. He also falls in love with her chaotic, free-wheeling family, so different from his polite, politically active parents. The Butterfields live in a large Victorian house that is often filled with an assortment of artists, musicians and people who simply show up. They've raised their three children to be without hang-ups, in a particularly late sixties way, and so when David practically moves into their daughter's room and their relationship becomes primarily physical, they hide their unease. But Jade has reservations as well, so when she brings her worries to her parents, they tell David that he needs to stay away for a month, to allow things to cool down. And David can't do it. He lurks outside the house, staring in through the large, uncurtained windows until he comes up with the plan of lighting a small fire, then walking around the block, timing things so that he runs into the family as they emerge from the house to find out where the smoke is coming from. They'll be forced to talk to him then, he reasons. But things don't work the way he had planned, and he ends up sent to a private psychiatric hospital for treatment, a sentence Jade's father finds egregiously lenient and David himself also finds intolerable, as it keeps him away from Jade.

This isn't a book about pure love thwarted. David isn't a hero; he's charismatic and manipulative, ingratiating and self-involved. Neither he nor the reader ever really gets to know Jade. When he thinks of her or pays her a compliment, it's always to do with some aspect of her appearance. He loves her obsessively, but as one would love a treasured possession. Nor is he able to care for anyone but himself.

I thought then as I was to think later: It was too late in his life for me to help and if I couldn't help, then where was the profit in caring?

Spencer takes the reader down the rabbit-hole of David's obsession, and every event and relationship is recounted only from David's slanted perspective, outside of a few brief letters sent to him. It makes for compelling reading, but it's not always an enjoyable experience. show less

In this 1979 novel, Scott Spencer brazenly presents the first-person chronicle of a tortured-in-love, obsessive young man. In portraying these adventures and misadventures, Mr. Spencer sets the bar improbably high for the type of destructive-behavior fiction he engages in – he proves the remarkable “Endless Love” is no fluke in “A Ship Made of Paper” (2003).

High-school senior David Axelrod loves Jade Butterfield literally to distraction. His passion – their passion – consumes them so completely that when Jade’s father Hugh decides David must not see anyone in the family for 30 days, he sets fire to the family’s home, with the idea that they will at least have to leave the house and be unable to avoid talking to David. show more This conflagration serves as the perfect metaphor for David’s passion: its speed and heat endanger the entire Butterfield family. It turns out that Jade’s mother Ann is aware of the extreme ardency between the two, and it excites her own nature to more passion than she’d ever known. The family generally knows about the two, however, and accept David, essentially adopting him into their family – for a time, at least.

David’s arson happens on an evening when the entire family, down to the barely-teenaged son Sammy, has dropped LSD for a family trip, and David must work at a Herculean level to rescue them. As punishment David is sent to a rather relaxed, permissive mental institution, where his only concerted effort is to deceive his psychiatrist into thinking he is changing, losing his obsession for Jade. Eventually David worms his way back into the family and resumes his life with Jade, only now he must hide a ghastly secret to do so. The reunion of David and Jade shows them at their passionate and destructive height.

The love-addled David addles the Butterfield family and while breaking parole, indirectly causes an accident that splinters it entirely. The passion the two young people have lights the entire narrative ablaze – and at the end David still, against all reason, keeps his passion for his long-gone lover. Scott Spencer succeeds brilliantly with this difficult task. In this timeless story of dangerous passion, David comes across as unquestioningly focused, blindly self-absorbed, and lucid in his madness. Mr. Spencer has a stunning gift for this theme, and retains an ardent admirer in this reviewer. Be prepared to be completely absorbed when you pick this up.

http://bassoprofundo1.blogspot.com/2011/03/endless-love-by-scott-spencer.html show less

Favorite quotes from Endless Love:

"I was totally victimized by the irrational navigation of my unconscious."

"I was, I knew then, a member of a vast network of condemned men and women: romance had taken a wrong turn within me and led me into mayhem."

My Two Cents: This is a classic book which has been reviewed by hundreds, if not thousands of readers and admired by the most credible book reviewers and magazines. So, instead of composing a traditional review, I'm choosing to blog about the impression that Endless Love made on me. I agree with the authors of "Read This Next," and recommend that everyone add this book to their "to-be-reads before I die list." Spencer smashes recent love stories making them look like romantic light and as show more shallow as a puddle in Arizona. The deeply passionate journey of David Axelrod epitomizes love at its most intense and insane. The descriptions grip at your guts and tingle all the way down through your toes. It's not an easy read, but the humanity and truthfulness of intimacy is so honest that it borders on perfection. Spencer is a master at constructing a genuine love scene with a rawness and tenderness that makes the heart ache with both madness and astonishment. show less

At the center of Endless Love is David Axelrod. David starts his story remembering how, as a 17 year in love, he set fire to his girlfriend's house. Not as an out-of-anger act of revenge but more of an uncontrollable response to an all-consuming love for his girlfriend, Jade and her family. Having been banished from the Butterfield home David's plot is to ignite the house in the hopes the fire will give him the perverse opportunity to become the hero and ultimately rescue the entire family from the inferno he started. His desire to be needed by the entire family is blinding. Of course David's plot doesn't work out so smoothly...and thus begins Unless Love. It is a dark and tangled tale about obsessions and the inability to see past show more them. It is about dysfunctional families that use one another to seem normal. It is about struggling relationships set against the ever turbulent late 1960s. In the middle is confused, young, obsessed David Axelrod. show less

Excessive, obsessive, adolescent and naive...but what elevated language. Highly disappointed in the plot and characterization but pleasantly surprised by the depth and richness of the literary devices used. I understand why it's a classic.

I absolutely loved this story. I remember my dad bringing it home to me when I was about 15. He had no idea what he was handing his sweet daughter, lol. The passion David had for Jade - I wanted that, although he had mental illness which contributed to his unstable love for her. Of course, the movie didn't show what the book did in the ending (the menstrual scene), but it really portrayed what he felt for her. I only dream of conveying that kind of passion in my writing with my couples. I know of the area for the setting of this story as I live in Chicago, so that was pretty cool to read about and see in the movie. I'll probably read this again.

This is a sort of letter from one lover to another, except that they parted some time ago under difficult circumstances: she called the police who incarcerated him.
The story begins with David, whose parents and all their friends are avid communists. He regards their view of society as more or less normal until, as a teenager, he meets Jade and her family. They have a completely relaxed, attitude to society. More or less: if I let you do your thing, you let me do mine. They were well into drugs and explored them as a family. David became so attached to their ways that he ended up living with them. And in Jade’s bed. To start with they slept in her single bed, but later her mother bought them a double bed. Eventually her father decided show more that David and Jade’s relationship was getting too intense and they agreed that David would keep away from Jade and the house for thirty days. David struggled with this and, eventually, set fire to a pile of newspapers in the porch of their house. Everyone inside is so drugged up that he has to go inside to rescue them.
He is committed to a psychiatric hospital where he spends three years. When he is released he goes back to his parents’ house. He is required to make no attempt whatsoever to contact Jade or her family; to attend the local university; to get a job; to see a psychiatrist twice a week and to visit his parole officer at regular intervals. After a time he manages to move into a flat of his own. But then he decides to find Jade. So he starts to ring all the people he can find with her surname. Finally, he finds her mother and leans that she has divorced Hugh and that the family is spread out all over America. They start to correspond, writing long letters to each other, though Ann doesn’t let slip anything about Jade.
He breaks parole and goes to New York where he stays in a hotel. Then he knocks on Ann’s door and, after some conversation, they go out together for a meal. He spends the night on her couch, even though she offers him her bed. They spend the next day together as well and seem to enjoy one another’s company. The next day, David sees Jade’s father in the street. He is with his new girlfriend. Hugh starts to cross the road to reach David but gets run over by a taxi and dies.
He and Ann view the corpse. The children all gather at Ann’s flat for the funeral. Afterwards, in the gathering at the flat, David is forced by one of the children to leave. He meets Jade just arriving in New York. They have a meal and then go to his hotel where they continue talking. They are reacquainting themselves with their old love for one another. Eventually they make love again and again and again during the night. They leave New York and go to live in the house she shares with other university students. While she is at university, he works at various jobs.
Their life is pretty good until Jade finds out that her father died because he didn’t look before crossing the road to confront David. She blames him for this and locks him out of the house. She informs the police that he is being a nuisance. They remove him and find out that he has broken parole. So he goes back to the psychiatric hospital he was in before. He spends some time there during which Jade marries a Frenchman and goes to France and his father dies. He also has sex with two women and fails to form a relationship with a third. Eventually his mother has no more money for the hospital and so he is committed to a State run one. There he is visited by Ann, Jade’s mother, who manages to get him released.
And so he writes this book for Jade telling of their joint lives. It’s a really good read with quite a few unexpected twists. I can thoroughly recommend it. show less