Sometimes my desire to read trash is so strong it leads me down a path that is either good, bad or just plain awful. More often than not that path ends in bad and at times just plain awful. I have no clue as to what on earth possessed me to read Endless Love. One moment I'm reading a good book and then suddenly I think to myself "Hey, why not read Endless Love? It's been on your list of books to read since forever." I should have heeded the warning sign that this book was going to be a puddle of sticky dog doo after reading a piece on how Scott Spencer feels his novel is beyond reproach and that both film adaptations were pieces of trash that missed the point. Please, bitch, please. Mr. Spencer needs to have several seats because his novel is nothing more than a self indulgent love letter to the art of stalking and to its practitioners.
Our stalker, David, tells us his tale of woe, of how he was brought into the bosom of the Butterfield family then so coldly discarded, actually he was sent to banned camp for thirty days, but I guess thirty days in the life of a horny teenaged boy is a lifetime. David loves the Butterfields, he loves mama Butterfield, poppa Butterfield, older brother Butterfield and little brother Butterfield, but mainly he loves Jade Butterfield. He loves Jade Butterfield with a fiery passion, a passion so strong the two teens create their own little world and have marathon sex sessions, David can stay hard for hours on end as he tells it. Because of these every night all night long sex sessions, delicate snowflake Jade isn't getting enough sleep. Poppa Butterfield tells David to get lost for at least thirty days, well David thinks so much with his penis he gets the brilliant idea to start a fire so the family will have to leave the house and then be forced to talk to him. Too bad he choses the very night the Butterfield family decided to trip balls together. The Butterfield parents are very permissive open minded parents of the late sixties, they allow their daughter to have sex in the house with her nearly live in boyfriend, they smoke marijuana and drop acid together all the while taking in a collection of freaks and granola munchers to gawk at and possibly learn from, or something "progressive" and "enlightened" like that.
Like the whinging self involved moron that he is, David readily confesses to his crime in a bid for redemption. Instead of redemption, he gets institutionalized. Thus begins his incessant crying and moaning and ruminating thoughts about the Butterfields, Jade, his sex life with Jade and his need to belong to the Butterfield family. Poor David never knew that a family could be so close and loving because his parents, mainly his mother, are self possessed cold ex communists. They may have quit the party, but the party never quit them.
Upon his release from the hospital David only has one thought and that's to find his letters to and from Jade. Day and night and night day this all he thinks about. When he finally gets a job enrolls in college and gets his own apartment he then only thinks about finding the Butterfield family. He searches in every phonebook in the country for Butterfields until he finds one then he skips parole to visit mama Butterfield. Mama Butterfield has divorced poppa Butterfield and embraced her inner cougar. She tells David that everyone in the family thinks that they were lovers so why not prove them all right? Of course he rejects her advances because he's saving himself for Jade. During his stay in mama Butterfield's city, poppa Butterfield sees David crossing the street, this makes poppa run after him causing him to be hit by a car. Somehow this is David's fault, I don't know how that is, but later in the story the blame is put squarely on his shoulders even though poppa Butterfield was crossing against traffic in order to get his hands onto David.
What follows is a reunion with the Butterfields to mourn their fallen patriarch, David finally meets up with Jade and then a long very detailed blood drenched fuck fest takes place. Reunited and it feels so good then secrets are revealed and then it all falls apart then an arrest is made and then punishment resumes. After years of sexual fidelity David decides that sexual healing is what he needs after learning that Jade has married some French guy.
This story is not romantic, it's creepy and gross. David is a creep, the Butterfield parents are just awful. What kind of parents let their children drop acid with them and let their underage daughter have sex with her underage boyfriend in their home? I don't care if this took place in the late sixties, bad parenting is bad parenting. David alludes to some kind of inappropriate incesty type relationship between Jade and her older brother Keith, their mother Anne alludes to the fact that her husband Hugh may have had some incestuous feelings for Jade and Anne admits she could only get off with her husband after watching Jade and David have sex. The characters are just flat out unlikeable. Anne is some kind of pompous cougar who harbors a desire for David and writes long winded wordy to the point that they make no sense letters, Jade is a slutty harpy faux lesbian tease and David is just all sorts of awful and creepy. And clocking in at over four hundred pages, it truly feels endless. But you don't feel endless love for this story or it's characters, you feel endless annoyance and a wish that they all died in the fire at the beginning.
