There'll be excitement [over Endless Love]. This testament of eloquent anguish—served ironically by a title Barbara Cartland might have discarded—cannot fail to cause a stir among people who take fiction seriously. It may also dazzle its way to commercial success, for its readability and gamier appointments. The important news, though, is that Endless Love is not an oracle of promise, but Spencer's very fulfillment. He has shown just what he can do….

Endless Love is much more courageous [than Spencer's previous novels]. In contrast to the emotional timidity of most American fiction, it is demonstrative past all embarrassment. Indeed, the book's design demands excessiveness—of a kind that would be scorned as "overwriting" in tamer stuff, but is here the root of seductive power….

Spencer's technique is certainly provocative. Shunning the convention of the flashback, he orchestrates past and present as a fugue, achieving rather ingeniously a unified narrative in which bygone events become active elements in the continuity and the reader finds himself in the thrall of suspense over things already committed to history—or, in this case, memory….

Endless Love is triumphantly a novel of character and action. David's own development is an exceptional literary accomplishment. An often exasperating youth, he is involuntarily cruel to his ineffectual parents, who cannot comprehend his obsession. (The Axelrods, and particularly David's father, are vividly drawn. Spencer has an extraordinary faculty for depicting parents and children who cannot articulate their love for each other.) Ann Butterfield, for whose late emergence as a writer David is the ironic catalyst, is thoroughly dissected. The only apparent exception to Spencer's command for fully fleshed characterization is Jade, but surely this is intentional. Jade must remain a kind of abstraction, for it is the idea of Jade as much as it is Jade herself with whom David is so infatuated. The sex in Endless Love—there are several passages of combustible, pulsating activity—is both quite marvelous and essential, as powerful proof of David's trance.

A novel delivered with such conviction easily implies an autobiographical tissue, but Spencer may confound us. His books are all highly individual, and not strait-jacketed by any one background. (David Axelrod shares with Virgil Morgan, the focal character of Preservation Hall, the narrative voice that is unmistakably the author's, yet they are an alluring contrast. Virgil is clearly stamped as one of life's winners, yet his well-ordered existence finally becomes unraveled. David seems a loser from the word go … but is he, really?) Though given to richness, Endless Love is forcefully direct. There are nuances suggestive of [John] Updike, and observations that ring of [John] Cheever; yet Spencer is more old-fashioned and eschews neither coincidence nor contrivance to serve his need. There has lately been some quiet speculation that Spencer may be "the next" John Irving, that Endless Love may capture the core of the Garp audience. Perhaps. Irving and Spencer are quite different in both style and technique; yet they are both enormously sympathetic.

Endless Love is remarkable for being an urgently compassionate novel that never becomes a sentimental one. Sentimentality is a net for emotional trapeze artists in prose. Spencer soars with no net below, and catches the bar every time.