Torch Song

By LANCE MORROW

ENDLESS LOVE

by Scott Spencer Knopf;

418 pages; $10.95

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."

In 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.

The 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.

The boy 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 and extraordinarily complicated moments involving David and his parents, stolid ex-Communists painfully falling out of love with each other. After the fire, forbidden by a court ever to see the Butterfields again, David secretly begins tracking them down--in New York, then in Vermont. He is reunited with Jade. She is much changed, of course; it is part of Spencer's cunning to make the reader understand what an ordinary and vaguely disagreeable wom an she is becoming, and also know why David loves her so completely.

Fate, working through coincidences, performs several kinds of malevolent interventions. In one brilliant scene. Jade's father, walking in Manhattan, spots David across the street and rushes after him in a rage; he is crushed to death in the traffic. Among other things, the book could be read as a grand parody of the idea that the course of true love never runs smooth. At last, David ends in jail, for breaking parole, if not for shattering all the lives around him. Jade vanishes into the oblivion of an unknowable domestic life with another man, a subsiding into reality that is as poignant as the marriage of Dolores Haze at the end of an earlier novel of obsessive love, Lolita.

--Lance Morrow

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.