'Style,' Thornton Wilder once wrote, 'is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.' Wilder's paradox, however, has not been heeded by Scott Spencer while writing his saga, Endless Love.

Scott Spencer's writing in this novel is as self-indulgent as his belief that the traumatic teenage love affair described can affect us as pure and untainted. Repeated sexual imagery palls faster than any other and is rarely evocative of selfless tenderness. Of sex, yes. But that, apparently, is not what the novel is about.