Endless Love [Paperback]

Scott Spencer (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 1, 1999

The classic novel that has been translated into over twenty languages and has sold more than two million copies worldwide

One of the most celebrated novels of its time, Endless Love remains perhaps the most powerful book ever written about young love. Riveting, compulsively readable, and ferociously sexual, Endless Love tells the story of David Axelrod and his overwhelming love for Jade Butterfield.

David and Jade are consumed with each other: their rapport, their desire, their sexuality, take them further than they understand. And when Jade's father banishes David from the home, he fantasizes the forgiveness his rescue of the family will bring, and he sets a "perfectly safe" fire to their house. What unfolds is a nightmare, a dark world in which David's love is a crime and a disease, a world of anonymous phone calls, crazy letters, and new fears—and the inevitable and punishing pursuit of the one thing that remains most real to him: his endless love for Jade and her family.

Published in 1979 and hailed as "one of the best books of the year" by the New York Times, Endless Love is the novel that first established Scott Spencer as "the contemporary American master of the love story" (Publishers Weekly).

Editorial Reviews

Review

A moving story of first love when it's so intense you feel it might break. It's everything a novel should be. -- Bob Greene, Chicago Tribune

He finds perfect pitch on the first page and never lets go. -- The Atlantic

From the Back Cover

The classic novel that has been translated into over twenty languages and has sold more than two million copies worldwide

One of the most celebrated novels of its time, Endless Love remains perhaps the most powerful book ever written about young love. Riveting, compulsively readable, and ferociously sexual, Endless Love tells the story of David Axelrod and his overwhelming love for Jade Butterfield.

David and Jade are consumed with each other: their rapport, their desire, their sexuality, take them further than they understand. And when Jade's father banishes David from the home, he fantasizes the forgiveness his rescue of the family will bring, and he sets a "perfectly safe" fire to their house. What unfolds is a nightmare, a dark world in which David's love is a crime and a disease, a world of anonymous phone calls, crazy letters, and new fears—and the inevitable and punishing pursuit of the one thing that remains most real to him: his endless love for Jade and her family.

Published in 1979 and hailed as "one of the best books of the year" by the New York Times, Endless Love is the novel that first established Scott Spencer as "the contemporary American master of the love story" (Publishers Weekly).

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial; 4th edition (January 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0880016280
• ISBN-13: 978-0880016285
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (60 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,122,323 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Scott Spencer was born in Washington, D.C., raised in Chicago, and now lives in upstate New York. He is the author of nine novels, including Endless Love, Waking the Dead, A Ship Made of Paper, and Willing. He has taught at the University of Iowa, Williams College, and Columbia University. His nonfiction has appeared in Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, O, Harper's, and The New York Times.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars outstanding, breathtaking, truly unique experience.... July 29, 1999

By Shannon Lupin

Format:Paperback

I too thought this book was "my little secret!" How wonderful to hear from others who feel the same way. One of the few books that have truly broken my heart - I felt changed after I read it. My ideas on love, obsession, living, family, and madness - all were altered by Scott Spencers' suberb, unduplicable writing stye. The intensity of his emotional and physical descriptions, coming from the viewpoint of David, leave you breathless and yearing for more. A masterpiece novel - one of my all time favorites, 15 years after first reading it!!

27 of 33 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Not a love story October 24, 2009

By Barbara Klein VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Scott Spencer must have been bemused when this novel was embraced as a moving story of first love, but then, why argue with success? As many have noted, however, it is a very unsatisfying love story because the object of David's affection is not on the scene for most of the story. Spencer comes right out and tells you as early as page 39 that our friend David Axlerod cannot even tell the truth about his favorite color much less describe his complex emotional state. David does not know how to tell the truth. Yet, he is our only witness. By the end, his perceptions are so faulty that you really do not know what is going on. In David's final encounter with Jade (wonderfully ironic name), she is terrified. David's explanation for her behavior simply makes no sense. By this time the reader has been given enough clues to know that David is not the innocent lover he pretends to be. The reader has to try to figure out what is really happening from what other people do, (the behavior of the police, for instance) rather than from David's perception of it, because he is insane.

The focus here is not love but the shift in cultural norms that took place in the sixties which left everyone unmoored by any shared value system. David's parents represent what amounted to the serious ethical stance in the fifties, the socialist ideal. Secular humanism was the religion of the educated middle class. David's solipsistic "love" for Jade and her hippy family demonstrates the limitations of an ethos rooted only in human values. These people are not looking for love; they are looking for god. But god, as Time Magazine would soon announce, was dead.

The interesting thing about the book is the way Spencer uses the narrative to show this. That is one reason, I think, that this book did not really age well. All of these games with unreliable narrators have been played out by now. It does get tedious after a while when you cannot figure out what is actually going on, and this book definitely suffers from that fault in the final chapters. You can do all these pyrotechnics with literary devices, but you still have to give the reader a coherent story. If you want to enjoy Spencer's narrative cleverness, I highly recommend his more recent novel, "Willing." In that book he manages to combine his narrative strategies with a very funny story that may or may not have "really" happened, whatever that might mean in the context of a fictional world.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Reread it again October 8, 2011

By John Galish

Format:Paperback

I just read this book again. I am 51 now and I read this book once or twice a decade, and I have been doing so since I first read it in the 1980's. This time, at 51, it was a touchstone to my youth. This time the book paid homage to the intensity and energy of romantic love that now looks like obsession from my comfortable middle aged perch. But I remember when it wasn't so. I remember when I was David.

This story has become a companion as I live my life. The words of the book stay the same but the angle that I see them changes every time I pick the book up, again.

This time when I finished the book I didn't see Jade in every seat. [You have to read the last page] This time I saw my younger self in every seat, looking at me, seeing my 51-year-old self, watching me, judging me.

It is one of only a tiny handful of books that I read over every few years to gain a new perspective on the story and on myself.