Endless Love (Open Road) [Kindle Edition] Author: Scott Spencer | Language: English | ISBN:
B00BBPW02O | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Seventeen-year-old David Axelrod is consumed with his love for Jade Butterfield. So when Jade’s father exiles him from their home, David does the only thing he thinks is rational: He burns down their house. Sentenced to a psychiatric institution, David’s obsession metastasizes, and upon his release, he sets out to win the Butterfields back by any means necessary.
Brilliantly written and intensely sexual, Endless Love is the deeply moving story of a first love so powerful that it becomes dangerous—not only for the young lovers, but for their families as well.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Scott Spencer, including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.
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- File Size: 951 KB
- Print Length: 436 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0880016280
- Publisher: Open Road Media; Reprint edition (November 23, 2010)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00BBPW02O
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #21,506 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #86
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Romance
- #86
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Romance
I first read this book many years ago in the throes of a Brooke Shields obsession. (Brooke played Jade, the female half of the teenage couple, in the 1980s movie version of this novel.) I was really expecting a cheesy teen romance, but this book is not exactly that. The main character, David, is Jade's high school boyfriend and the majority of the book takes place when he and Jade are broken up, so Jade is present through much of the story only as a memory or a fantasy of David's. Therefore, a lot of the romance is taking place in David's mind, and since he's not the most stable of characters, you have to wonder. Throughout the book other people, including Jade's mother, David's high school classmate, and others comment on their impressions of David and Jade's past love affair, thus providing a curious Rashomon-like effect. You have this teen couple who were so much in love they were oblivious to everybody else, yet everybody else was still very much noticing them.
David, to put it bluntly, is an obsessed stalker. Flashbacks tell how, in high school, he fell in love with Jade, the daughter of a permissive, neohippie (nowadays they would be called "new age") family. Jade's family allowed her and David to share a bed, with all that entailed, in the family household - if you grew up in the 60s and 70s you'll realize that this was definitely NOT the norm for high schoolers at that time. Jade's mother is secretly unhappy over being reminded of the passionate young romantic life she no longer has with her husband; Jade's father, who the book suggests is more traditionally disturbed by his little girl's having sex than he wants to let on, eventually bans David from Jade's bed and indeed, the whole house.
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.
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