At first glance, Endless Love seems likely to be a chore for the reader. Its central character is yet another adolescent boy, more or less out of tune with his parents. When we meet him, he's setting fire to his girlfriend's house. In short order he confesses to his crime and enters a posh psychiatric clinic….

But it's soon apparent that David is no ordinary adolescent. He isn't merely passing through a phase; his age is incidental. In fact, he's a full-blown tragic hero. He is obsessed by such a consuming passion for Jade Butterfield, his girlfriend, that it colors and reshapes his life—even destroys it. That so grand an emotion should strike someone too young to handle it does complicate events, of course; but it seems probable that at any age, at any point when David's intensity happened to combine with the flamboyance and disarray of Jade Butterfield's family, he would have met with disaster. He makes errors that are irreversible, a grownup's errors; they cannot be patched over (like Holden Caulfield's) with a little psychiatric counseling or a few more birthdays.

What is required from the reader is that he view David's love affair seriously. This takes some time. There is nothing unforgettable about Jade Butterfield, and her family is downright irritating—one of those self-consciously modern families in which the parents have only younger friends, experiment with LSD, obtain Enovid for their daughters, and invade their children's worlds with a kind of acquisitiveness and greed. We could dismiss them all, if it weren't for David.

He is single-minded, unnaturally focused, somehow triumphantly sane even when he seems more withdrawn than any sane man is supposed to be. Emerging as he does from a narrow, airless world (rather faded, ex-communist parents, a grim apartment in a declining Chicago neighborhood), he conveys a sense of stark sobriety that rivets the reader's gaze upon him. We may smile, at first, at his earnestness; so did the Butterfields smile. But then we fall under his spell. We begin to believe, as surely as David himself, that some people may be joined together in webs and tangles from which there is no escape. By the end of the book his love affair is to us, too, tragic and permanent and deeply, surprisingly moving.

While it's very much an original, Endless Love has something in common with Iris Murdoch's A Word Child and Robertson Davies's Fifth Business—two other novels that give a full measure of respect to the linkages of fate. In all three books, certain people either willingly or unwillingly serve as catalysts in certain other people's lives—or sometimes, more actively, as monkey wrenches. David Axelrod is never entirely innocent (his determined hunt for various Butterfields makes the book as absorbing as a detective story), but he is, in many ways, a victim. He is done in by the bizarre openness of the Butterfields, by his pinched background that makes that openness so appealing, and by his own charm and obvious good intentions, which cause some of the Butterfields, guiltily, secretively, to sustain the threads that bind him to them. (p. 35)

There are other Butterfields, however, who will have nothing to do with David, who hate and fear him. This adds an important element; for as well plotted as Endless Love is—masterfully plotted, so it's difficult not to cheat and flip to the final page—the true genius of the book is its characterization of David. Really, the more hostile Butterfields remind us, who is David Axelrod but one of those rejected lovers you can find on the back page of any newspaper? You see them shadowing ex-sweethearts, receiving injunctions from the local courts—untrustworthy, fragile people, nuisances at best, eternal losers, or at worst outright maniacs, likely to leap in any direction at the slightest provocation. In the course of this novel, David not only burns up a house but breaks parole, causes a fatal traffic accident, and manhandles his mother. But he's never merely a villain, and if we feel any fear in this book it is for him, not of him. This is largely because Scott Spencer places us so squarely in David's world. The "upper-class ping" of the Butterfields' voices, the grinding desperation of David's sexual contacts with Jade, the bleakness and moral uprightness of the objects in his parents' bureau drawers—all combine to give us a sense of a genuine, believable life. (pp. 35-6)

[David] is unerringly perceptive, sympathetic even to those he harms in the course of his obsession. As the novel winds down—as we draw back and see David from outside (28 years old now, unemployed and poorly educated, failed, beaten down, probably someone we'd pass hurriedly on a sidewalk)—we have an immense sense of loss and waste. Something happens in this book; both its hero and its readers have been changed by the time it ends. Scott Spencer is a magnificent writer, and Endless Love is his finest novel. (p. 36)