Word: loved
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...fire, described in wonderfully horrific narrative slow motion, is not the climax but the ignition point of Endless Love. The night of the fire, Jade and her family, the Butterfields, are performing a countercultural experiment and become paralyzed by LSD; David rushes in to save them. But his passionate arson destroys his love affair, drives the Butterfields away to another city and lands David in a downstate mental institution...
...ENDLESS LOVE...
...Young love is a fanaticism inhabiting a region somewhere between the silly and the metaphysical. Scott Spencer understands the territory well: its shimmering landscapes, its enclosing solipsism, the profound and dippy magic by which children suddenly acquire passion. In Endless Love, the mother of one such adolescent says in rueful retrospect: "We felt as if we'd given a child permission to experiment with a little chemistry set only to find she was an undiscovered genius-solving ancient alchemical riddles, bonding once incompatible molecules, filling the cellar with luminous smoke...
...this third novel (after Last Night at the Brain Thieves' Ball and Preservation Hall) Spencer builds a model of emergent love pursued to its obsessive extreme. The author constructs his tale around an apposite metaphor, catastrophic fire. Seventeen-year-old David Axelrod sets some newspapers alight on the porch of his beloved Jade's house after her parents have forbidden him to see her for 30 days. He wishes to attract attention and instead nearly incinerates Jade, her brothers and parents...
...will not rest. "If being in love is to be suddenly united with the most unruly, the most outrageously alive part of yourself," he records in the first-person narrative, "this state of piercing consciousness did not subside in me, as I've learned it does in others, after a time. If my mind could have made a sound, it would have burst a row of wineglasses. I saw coincidences everywhere; meanings darted and danced like overheated molecules." Spencer's tensely energetic prose catches perfectly the lyricism and bombast of single-minded passion. It also registers some sweet...