[Scott Spencer] has achieved something quite remarkable in ["Endless Love," an] unabashedly romantic and often harrowing novel. He has created an adolescent love that is believably endless; in fact, we believe that there is no end to which the lover will not go to reach his beloved….

Mr. Spencer carries us along by giving David, who tells the story, a powerful voice—violent, erotic, overwrought, naïve…. David feasts on … reckless passion and on pain: sobs crack like falling trees; lovers, covered with menstrual blood, look like victims of a savage crime. On occasion he lapses into romantic clichés—his love is "more real than time, more real than death, more real, even, than she and I"—but his language is usually compelling, subtly rhythmic, finely tuned.

Mr. Spencer has an acute grasp of character and situation. He gives us details that make these often tormented people uncommonly convincing. There are the erotic ties within the Butterfield family that are threatened by David's intrusion; the absence of such ties in his own parents; his mother's confused pain at his obsession; his father's active interest in it. But unfortunately Jade herself seems hardly there; in fact, she is little more than "affection's symbolic locus," like the mechanical heart she and David visit in the Museum of Science. (p. 13)

Although this is a love story, it may be something else as well: much of the drama lies not in David's love for Jade, but in his confrontations with the world from which his passions have exiled him. Mr. Spencer's earlier and less successful novels explored similar themes. In his first, "Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball" (1973)—a tepid and cliché-ridden sci-fi yarn—an experimental psychologist leaves the ordinary world to join a totalitarian think-tank that seeks control over the brains of its subjects; the psychologist is eventually punished for inadequate control over his own desires. Mr. Spencer's often impressive second novel, "Preservation Hall" (1976), isolates two couples in a Maine blizzard. The narrator's tenuous control over his irrational fears and passions is tested by the pressure of other lives; he too is threatened with punishment.

David is similarly isolated. He carries his dream of endless love "beyond all reasonable limits … stepping outside of the law." His love cuts him off from society, family, and even from Jade herself; the worship of his feelings, he says, is his only spiritual life. Dangerous and narcissistic, petulantly adolescent, his love becomes a threat to the social and moral order, a "war with all the world." He kindles adolescent dreams in Jade's parents, who divorce and search for other loves, and he ignites forgotten needs in his own father and mother.

At times Mr. Spencer seems to suggest parallels between David's love and the political and cultural passions of the older generation—his parents' devotion to the Communist Party. Jade's parents' countercultural sympathies. All the characters are destructively innocent in their comprehension of "eros and civilization"; and the Butterfields' curious "openness" unleashes possibilities that neither David nor Jade can control.

But this is not what makes the novel so compelling. We want David to succeed in his love. In his heroic insistence, he becomes a figure from the countercultural myths of the 1960's: the rebel whose heightened sensitivity makes him a victim of society's brutal laws and institutions. His adolescent endless love becomes a sign of authenticity in a world of compromise. This tends to undercut the moral and social subtleties that Mr. Spencer has created; it betrays his confusion about his themes. Nevertheless, this confusion expresses both our attraction to the isolating force of sexual desire and our nostalgia for adolescent love.

Mr. Spencer's considerable talents prevent such confusion from destroying what is an exceptionally powerful novel. He has great sympathy for his characters, and the skill to arouse our feelings for them. Such care and sympathy may not be the endless love of the title, but it is something we could certainly use more of, and not only in our fiction. (pp. 13, 26)