Back-List: THE VIRGINS

Unique take on coming of age.

I can say now that nothing in my life since has ever been as difficult. Bruce-Bennett-Jones, narrator, THE VIRGINS, by Pamela Erens.

This review is a long time coming. I’ve had Pamela Erens’ second novel, THE VIRGINS, on my pile for more than ten years. Why did it keep slipping lower on the pile you might ask? In truth, I’d sworn off coming of age fiction. The famous literary bildungsroman. After all, how many ways can you express adolescent angst? We get the whole picture in CATCHER IN THE RYE or THE OUSTIDERS. The acknowledged turbulent passage from childhood to adolescence, even in the pen of a great writer, gets old. We’ve all been there.

And then there’s TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, but that’s a whole other sort of tale.

My used paperback copy of THE VIRGINS steadfastly held its place on the pile all these years and when at last I read the first few pages, I was hooked. Far more than the predictable coming of age saga and more than the boarding school drama, this beautifully rendered page-turner focuses on the awkward beginnings of sexual awakening complicated, and shattered, by the fury evoked by envy and entitlement.

A story about want and misunderstanding as complex and tragic as Shakespeare.

We beginners experienced sex as psyche more than body, as vulnerability and power, exposure and flight, being consumed, saved, transfigured. To fail at it — to do it wrong — was to experience (and please do not smirk; try to remember what it was like, once upon a time) the death of one’s ideal soul.

All coming of age novels explore a loss of innocence, of course, by definition, teens driven by hormones and self-doubt. None more so than John Knowles’ A SEPARATE PEACE, which takes place at a prep school much like this school, which seems like Exeter, where both Erens and Knowles attended, and which offers its own powerful spin.

The ancillary first-person narrative in THE VIRGINS is what made the novel compelling for me, a form of narrative I’ve always admired and which is hard for a writer to pull off. A secondary character tells the tale and knows more and sees more than possible when not present, but the willing suspension of disbelief encourages the reader to believe him. Think Nick of THE GREAT GATSBY or the best friend’s daughter in CHARMING BILLY, or Somerset Maugham himself as the omnipotent narrator in my personal favorite, THE RAZOR’S EDGE. In the end, whoever tells the tale is who the tale is about.

Years later, Aviva will surely know that it happens so often it’s almost comical: the man wilting at that first approach. A woman is always frightening the first time.. And later, things will be all right, and he will forget all about that initial humiliation, his fears, his stumble.

In this case, a rather despicable, also pitiable boy, the latest in multiple generations of legacy at the exclusive school, narrates from the vantage point of years past, and who, from day one at the schools, was enamored of a captivating freshman, a Jew, who proves to be troubled in ways that capture the attention of narcissists as well as protectors. He is admittedly obsessed with her seductive behavior with another student, particularly perhaps because he is an outsider as well. A Korean. It is their blatant sensuality that proves unsettling and catastrophic.

Hell has no fury like adolescent fury. [Paraphrasing William Congreve, 1697.]

She seems to be moving along these pathways, not in a bodily way, but as some other form of presence. She is following corridors, some wide and some narrow, with a sense of burrowing farther and farther away from the outside, the outside where she can stand and look at herself, see a head, shoulders, legs. She is inside, and so she can’t see anything. She thinks she may become lost, that she will forget how to make her way back.

Donna Tart’s A SECRET HISTORY is considered by many the quintessential campus story, in that case, a college campus, where students, still adolescents for most of their tenure, delude themselves into believing they are adults and make decisions as if they have moved beyond that tender passage to the other side, although we know they haven’t.

If such stories fascinate, watch/rewatch DEAD POET’S SOCIETY, which explores with great sensitivity and insight, the drive to perfection cultivated in an all-boys school for the sons of the patriarchy. You may also want to read Rebecca Makkai ‘s more recent novel, I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU, which explored a campus mystery from the perspective of years past via a narrator who seems at first an interested party and finds herself complicit, on reflection, in the rampant misogyny and racism of that time. A different angst, closely connected.

They all focus their narrative lens on the loss of innocence and the questionable behavior of young people whose frontal cortex is not fully developed and who are, still, at the mercy of their parental and academic influences. None, however, as the title of this novel suggests, focus so closely on sexual awakening not only as a natural extension of adolescence, but in its power to arouse jealousy. In their tentative steps to independent lifestyles, these students suffer the sense of abandonment children bear when their safety nets are withdrawn too soon. Too many lose their way.

This is not a happy reading. Troubling and saddening, as well as fascinating [and yes, a lot of sex, realistically and meticulously depicted.] THE VIRGINS is a very different take on coming of age and one of those stories that demands our attention, not only as a good novel, but as a way of reconsidering our own youthful selves, and being more sensitive to the young still in our orbit.

Cheers.