Books

Go to the archives

Endless Love

Scott Spencer

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: May 22, 2022
Category: Fiction

A failed movie gets more attention than a successful book  published in long ago 1976, even when the book’s been translated into 20 languages and has sold two million copies. That is why, if you know about “Endless Love” at all, you probably remember the movie made by Franco Zeffirelli. It starred Brooke Shields and a young actor who is no longer on anyone’s map. Forget the movie…

The novel is told by the boy, David Axelrod. It’s the story of his endless love — that is, his obsessive love, his love that looks to all the world like madness — for Jade Butterfield. They’re teenagers, but there’s nothing “puppy love” about what they feel. This is romance that rocks their souls, addicts them to one another, turns each word and touch into a moonshot.

At the start of the book, David has been banned from the Butterfield house for a month. One night, he cannot do without seeing Jade. So….he sets a small fire. Which turns into a larger fire. Which burns the Butterfield house down, almost killing them. But let David tell it. Here is the opening of the book:

When I was seventeen and in full obedience to my heart’s most urgent commands, I stepped far from the pathway of normal life and in a moment’s time ruined everything I loved — I loved so deeply, and when the love was interrupted, when the incorporeal body of love shrank back in terror and my own body was locked away, it was hard for others to believe that a life so new could suffer so irrevocably. But now, years have passed and the night of August 12, 1967, still divides my life.

It was a hot, dense Chicago night. There were no clouds, no stars, no moon. The lawns looked black and the trees looked blacker; the headlights of the cars made me think of those brave lights the miners wear, up and down the choking shaft. And on that thick and ordinary August night, I set fire to a house inside of which were the people I adored more than anyone else in the world, and whose home I valued more than the home of my parents.

Before I set fire to their house I was hidden on their big wooden semicircular porch, peering into their window. I was in a state of grief. It was the agitated, snarling grief of a boy whose long rapturous story has not been understood. My feelings were raw and tender, and I watched the Butterfields through the weave of their curtains with tears of true and helpless longing in my eyes. I could see (and love) that perfect family while they went on and on with their evening without seeing me.

Wow. That is what I believe they call Writing. But is that David writing — or is that his heart? Hard to say. Love has turned David into a poet; he’s in some permanently altered state, his being totally fixed on the girl whose every breath gives him life.

David is guilty of so much, and nobody buys that he has been driven mad by lovesickness — he’s shipped off to a mental hospital and ordered not to contact the Butterfields. From his point-of-view, it would be better if he were whipped. “From the moment I set the fire,” he writes, “all of my life was an argument against keeping my love alive.” But he will! His love will never change! He will see Jade! He will win her back! He must! He must!

Scott Spencer, a novelist of great gifts, never falters — he turns obsession, a sick thing, into an open-ended question. We can’t decide: Do we want Jade and David to get back together? If they do, can they live together in a way that’s less than incendiary? Or would it be a beautiful destiny for them to consume one another, to kiss and touch and merge until they immolate? [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

In our daily lives, these are not questions we ask much. But oh, how we wish we did. We are burning for love, all of us, or, once, we did — it’s the earthly grail. And so we read on with no flagging of interest, through David’s self-abasement, his reversals, his seeming triumphs, an 11-year saga that exhausts almost everyone who gets near it. Except David.

I’m not giving away the ending, but I do want to share the final lines:

I am standing on a long, black stage, with a circle of light on me, which is my love for you, enduring. I have escaped — or been expelled — from eternity and am back in time. But I step out once more to sing this aria, this confession, this testament without end. My arms open wide, not to embrace you but to embrace the world, the mystery we are caught in. There is no orchestra, no audience; it is an empty theater in the middle of the night and all the clocks in the world are ticking. And now for this last time, I don’t mind, or even ask if it is madness: I see your face, I see you, you; I see you in every seat.

Dazzling.