Endless Love by Scott Spencer Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Endless Love
Book Review: Not That Great
Summary: 2 Stars
I don't understand why so many people loved this novel so much. It is interesting until about the middle, then it starts to get more boring. The sex scenes are boring and unoriginal, and I don't see why David is supposed to be "innocent", when he is clearly disturbed.Book Review: Not a love story
Summary: 2 Stars
Scott Spencer must have been bemused when this novel was embraced as a moving story of first love, but then, why argue with success? As many have noted, however, it is a very unsatisfying love story because the object of David's affection is not on the scene for most of the story. Spencer comes right out and tells you as early as page 39 that our friend David Axlerod cannot even tell the truth about his favorite color much less describe his complex emotional state. David does not know how to tell the truth. Yet, he is our only witness. By the end, his perceptions are so faulty that you really do not know what is going on. In David's final encounter with Jade (wonderfully ironic name), she is terrified. David's explanation for her behavior simply makes no sense. By this time the reader has been given enough clues to know that David is not the innocent lover he pretends to be. The reader has to try to figure out what is really happening from what other people do, (the behavior of the police, for instance) rather than from David's perception of it, because he is insane.
The focus here is not love but the shift in cultural norms that took place in the sixties which left everyone unmoored by any shared value system. David's parents represent what amounted to the serious ethical stance in the fifties, the socialist ideal. Secular humanism was the religion of the educated middle class. David's solipsistic "love" for Jade and her hippy family demonstrates the limitations of an ethos rooted only in human values. These people are not looking for love; they are looking for god. But god, as Time Magazine would soon announce, was dead.
The interesting thing about the book is the way Spencer uses the narrative to show this. That is one reason, I think, that this book did not really age well. All of these games with unreliable narrators have been played out by now. It does get tedious after a while when you cannot figure out what is actually going on, and this book definitely suffers from that fault in the final chapters. You can do all these pyrotechnics with literary devices, but you still have to give the reader a coherent story. If you want to enjoy Spencer's narrative cleverness, I highly recommend his more recent novel, "Willing." In that book he manages to combine his narrative strategies with a very funny story that may or may not have "really" happened, whatever that might mean in the context of a fictional world.
Book Review: One of the Truly Great Modern Novels
Summary: 5 Stars
What a week! First the election and then Endless Love. I read the last page of this beautiful, brilliant novel at 3:30AM. I went to sleep, got up three hours later and started it again from the beginning. Spencer is a big, risk-taking talent. This book does what art is supposed to do but almost always never does: it changes you.Book Review: Petrarch meets de Sade
Summary: 4 Stars
The title of this chronicle of teen angst is a pun on the staying power of the male protagonist. Endless Libido might have been more apropos. But that's the story's message: What happens when the pagan gods of lust and love fuse indistinguishably? Here, the epiphany demolishes the teen protagonist. This is a passion play fueled by rampant Sadean libido, sublimated Petrachan love, and the Tristan-Isolde theme. Beautiful lyric narrative clothes these lower and higher forms and forces in kaleidoscopic nuances of physical shade and texture. Possessed by forces beyond his control or comprehension, the protagonist descends into mephistophelian nightmare and Orwellian 1984 denouement. The story, in other words, is a testament to the transcendence of love:
"Of course when you love someone it is a tireless passion to experience their pleasure, especially sexual pleasure. Of all the many perversions, the one I found myself most capable of succumbing to was voyeurism - as long as the object of my voyeurism was Jade. I never failed to be moved by her expressions of sexual pleasure. When we were first learning to make love and I had some trouble in controlling myself, she had to be careful to keep as quiet as possible. Even heavy breathing would speed my climax, not to even mention moans. Later in our life together, when we were making love three, four, and five times a night (for our passion grew with our prowess), Jade would sometimes become impatient for my final orgasm - which would come with more difficulty than hers, because of the natural differences between the genders - and to bring us safely home so we both might fall asleep she would feign groans of pleasure with her lips right next to my ear, or say my name. It wouldn't really take anything more than that" (page 313).
"The pain of love."
Book Review: The Work Of A Genius. Thanks Scott Spencer. Forever!
Summary: 5 Stars
Please read all of the wonderful reviews below if it will make a more urgent recommendation that you read this book and, of course, forget that the movie was ever made.I, like many others, picked up the paperback in the early 1980's. There was something about the cover, of all things, that clued me to the fact that it was worth skimming the first page. That was all it took to whisk it up to the check-out counter and begin my eighteen-year long relationship with this masterpiece.
What was so enjoyable about the book, aside from the superb writing, were the evocations of the happy times I spent in Chicago. As David comes home from his two-year long stay in a private mental hospital after burning down his girlfriend's family home, he returns to his parents home in Evanston to make the necessary transition to a productive and happier life. His time in Chicago appears, for all the world, to be the best thing for his recovery. He takes us downtown to many beloved landmarks in the city and through his successful re-entry into the world. Beware, for that is the most uplifting, gratifying part of this story. The rest of the tale will put your heart through a meat-grinder as you come to discover that David's recovery is something done merely for show. He is putting in the requisite time and the necessary smoke screen before he can make his next self-destructive move. Yet, in spite of the fact that I knew every step of the way that he was flying toward imminent disaster, I was also cheering him on and hoping that the looming obvious might not be true.
There were scenes in the book that were more wrenching, infinitely more vivid and unforgettable that any you could see in a film--even a film of the best quality. So it should come as no surprise that the film adaptation of Endless Love truly stunk. It was a reeking insult to a book that probably should have never been filmed in the first place.
When I got to the last page, I was still hoping even though David's life was so hopelessly different from the way it had begun. But what you, the reader, cannot possibly know until you have read the last line of the book, is the depths of David's obsession. The last line of that book was so devastating, that I knew it was the book of my lifetime. Any book that has brought the level of emotional involvement to as many serious readers as has Endless Love, is truly the work of a genius.