[Endless Love] is like quicksand. Beneath the surface it seethes, inhales and sucks the reader down. Fictional life with Scott Spencer is no relaxation, no refuge from the city or the suburbs. His is an all-encompassing, near-suffocating world that forces involvement and is unwilling to relinquish us to mere daily life. (p. 1)

The boundaries between sanity and madness are blurred in Endless Love…. We do not know if David is insane. His intricate self-analysis lays out every layer of his obsession with Jade. She herself is almost a cypher and seems too matter-of-fact to inspire such devotion. We are not really concerned with her. It is as if we were looking through the lens of a high-powered microscope into David's very being. A startling scene meets the eye: luxuriant, full of astonishing detail, but verging on the grotesque, a little ominous.

Scott Spencer has chosen to write of worlds slightly off-balance, with colors too bright and characters contorted by their affections or twists of fate. His first novel, Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball, was a warming-up exercise for the imagination…. The warping factor in Preservation Hall was less visionary: the fanaticism of a political cadre. There is something comic about its bungling operation, but nonetheless, its influence turns a romantic retreat in Maine into a nightmare. In that book another complex and optimistic relationship bends and buckles under unnatural stress. Spencer succeeds in making us care more for David Axelrod, but he too is condemned. His love for Jade is heroic. He will sacrifice anything—family, future, his very sanity—to his love for Jade, and yet this passion engenders only moments of glory and a lifetime of emptiness and death-in-life. Spencer's heroes carry a heavy curse.

The women, on the other hand, seem in a strange reversal to survive the ravages of love that have traditionally been fatal to them. David's mother Rose, unhappy in marriage, bereft of her son, widowed, still struggles on, survives to take David back. Ann, Jade's mother, and a crucial protagonist in their saga, also loses her husband, first to divorce and then to death, but she continues on and visits David in prison while touring as the author of a successful book. Jade herself is given tangible life after love. But for David's father Arthur there is a heart attack, for Hugh death in the path of a speeding taxi, and for David himself only life without a mainspring.

Spencer has enormous power as a writer. He takes no easy options. He details the endless nuances of human feeling with infinite care. His writing is fearless and at times overwhelming as he piles phrase on phrase…. At other times his prose is spare and splendid: "Our bodies were fluttering. Birds caught in a cold chimney." This gift for the sudden, inescapable image keeps the continuing soul-searching from drifting into hopeless abstraction. The emotional is intertwined with the physical, tears with anguish. David cries wrenchingly and often.

Is this novel enjoyable? Successful? The answer to the latter must be equivocal. Scott Spencer is becoming a writer of astonishing depth and power. Yet the canvas is too crowded, there is no room to breathe, no space between the reader and the protagonist. The reader cannot be force-fed like the patéde-fois goose. He needs more time and space to appreciate the riches offered. "Enjoyable?" Too soft a word for Scott Spencer. The sensations aroused by reading this novel are more akin to the legendary thrill of riding some fearsome, swooping, sickening rollercoaster—"What the hell am I doing here?" one moment, and the next a short walk to join the line for another ride. The speed, the fear, the anticipation sharpen the pleasure of walking quietly on solid ground. And that is the joy of Endless Love. (p. 4)