In spite of [Samuel] Richardson, Emily Brontë, or [D. H.] Lawrence, you would hardly know from reading most Anglo-American fiction that it's love that makes the world go round. For the Protestant imagination, passionate sexual desire needs to be satirized, sentimentalized, or domesticated, as if it were some severe but exotic disease which, properly isolated, needn't interfere with important concerns like money, politics, manly adventure, or social education. Now, even in a more lenient moral climate, we get lots of sexual performance but not much love. Most of the great love stories are still imports.

Scott Spencer's Endless Love, a serious novel of wholehearted desire, thus seems odd and intriguing….

Spencer plays it straight. David is neither a teenage monster nor a victim of an absurd social system, he's just an intelligent and sensitive boy in love.

His extreme passion does of course have a background. His own parents are earnest Jewish ex-communists who give their emotions to important public causes but aren't very good at private love. He is drawn to Jade Butterfield (a name, as I'm sure Spencer knows, that seems to have leaped out of a Harlequin Romance) because her family so clearly represents liberated feeling….

But Spencer knows the difference between conditions and causes. David doesn't love Jade because he's an adolescent or feels unloved at home or finds her "lifestyle" seductive; nor is it the fault of the age or the culture he has to grow up in. He loves her, Spencer seems to say, simply because he has a mysterious gift for loving which most people lack. And that gift makes of him a kind of figure usually relegated to "popular" fiction and song, films and soap-operas—the lover as, in essence, criminal and maniac. His kind of love is what young people are told they will outgrow and almost always do, if only because they've been told they will; it's what some adults talk to priests and psychiatrists about, what keeps the sensational press and the police courts so busy. I admire the book for being able to play so close to the muddy stuff of mass entertainment without quite getting its hands dirty….

"Madness" is not the question; to call David mad, or pitiful, or ridiculous, is only to avoid feeling something of what intensity of desire is like. He says it better by describing himself as an operatic actor—playing his role intensely, perhaps even overplaying it, since, even though the performance and the audience may be "illusions," only in the role is there a chance of living up to his own best possibilities. This odd, scrupulous, rather exhausting novel succeeds in making one think again about a kind of feeling one may not usually be prepared to take seriously. (p. 43)