{"id":26,"date":"2014-01-30T02:24:48","date_gmt":"2014-01-30T02:24:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/?p=26"},"modified":"2014-01-31T04:31:16","modified_gmt":"2014-01-31T04:31:16","slug":"endless-love-by-scott-spencer-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/2014\/01\/30\/endless-love-by-scott-spencer-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Endless Love by Scott Spencer, Part II"},"content":{"rendered":"

As mentioned in my earlier post, the opening of Endless Love<\/strong><\/em> by Scott Spencer enraptured me and I was eager to finish reading it.\u00a0 I thought I\u2019d also compare the novel to the 1981 Brooke Shields film.\u00a0 A re-make opens in a couple weeks.<\/p>\n

The first thing that struck me was Spencer\u2019s discipline as an author.\u00a0 This is a 400-page arrow of a novel that never strays from the mark of David\u2019s passion.\u00a0 It\u2019s a novel about first love and how its flames can (literally) engulf and destroy everything around it, alter lives forever, and drive one to madness.\u00a0 Spencer accomplishes an amazing feat by getting the reader to share David\u2019s yearning for Jade.\u00a0 He does this with skills comparable to those of a talented seductress.\u00a0 He teases, gives us glimpses, leaves us writhing for more.\u00a0 In fact, David\u2019s Jade appears in only a few flashback scenes early in the novel.\u00a0 We glimpse her only briefly, we see David yearning for her and plotting to see her, and we feel his desperation, but it will be nearly 300 pages before we actually get to consummate our love affair by meeting Jade in person.\u00a0 A lesser writer would be inclined to spend those hundreds of pages trying build up a love affair by showing endearments, hand-holding beneath the stars, flowers, dances, and kisses\u2026 which would make for a boring novel. \u00a0Spencer cuts straight to the core of \u201cfirst love\u201d in part by realizing that the \u201clove\u201d itself is clich\u00e9, but the mad, all-consuming passion surrounding it is what is compelling.<\/p>\n

So after the opening pages, David is in a mental hospital by court order for arson.\u00a0 What\u2019s driven him crazy is that he was rejected not only by Jade, but by her entire family.\u00a0 They had taken him in.\u00a0 He lived under their roof.\u00a0 They shared everything together; they were an eccentric, but very close family.\u00a0 Then suddenly they pushed him away, with no explanations.\u00a0 He was injured not only by the loss of his first love, but by the rejection from the rest of the family.\u00a0 After the fire, their family split up and spread across the country.\u00a0 This becomes an ongoing theme of the novel, of how David\u2019s all-consuming first love can destroy everything in its path, including David\u2019s own life and well-being.<\/p>\n

The themes and imagery motifs are well-constructed and carefully woven into the narrative.\u00a0 The most pervasive and powerful motifs revolved around hearts, blood, and flames, and there are many subtle word choices, descriptions, and images that keep this playing at the back of the reader\u2019s minds (like Jade, in frustration, poking at her car\u2019s cigarette lighter, or white snow behind a car turning the color of ash from the exhaust).\u00a0 Endless Love<\/strong> is the definitive novel of first love, and a true tour-de-force.<\/em><\/p>\n

About the film, I will say that I don\u2019t envy anybody trying to adapt this novel for the screen.\u00a0 The first challenge is the structure; while it works on paper to have David yearning for Jade for the first 75%, before the reader really gets to see them together, you couldn\u2019t expect a filmmaker to withhold Brooke Shields until the last 20 minutes of the film.\u00a0 David\u2019s yearning in the novel is created by the interiority of his first person narrative; rather than trying to replace this with voice-overs and flashbacks, the filmmakers tried to impose a traditional arc on the story.\u00a0 Shortcuts had to be made, and the most tragic of these cuts was that David and Jade never get a period of reunion; they are instead thrust straight past any period of redemption or hopefulness to the next plot point.\u00a0 And ultimately the filmmakers were powerless to the rising star-power of Brooke Shields, and they tried to twist the story so that the final moral of the story is hers to learn.\u00a0 Suddenly it\u2019s a story of how Brooke Shields\u2019 character needs to mature and become a woman\u2014which has nothing to do with the thrust of the novel (although Jade does mature in the novel, it happens \u201cbehind the scenes\u201d). In short, all the powerful metaphors for first love in the novel become a disjointed string of pointless mishaps on the screen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As mentioned in my earlier post, the opening of Endless Love by Scott Spencer enraptured me and I was eager …<\/p>\n

Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[6,4,15,5],"class_list":["post-26","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-brooke-shields","tag-endless-love","tag-first-love","tag-scott-spencer"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28,"href":"https:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions\/28"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/troyehlers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}