The Virgins (novel)
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Diane Chonette (design)
John Murray (UK, 2014)
 First edition | |
| Author | Pamela Erens |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Alexis Mire (photo)[1] Diane Chonette (design) |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Tin House Books (US) John Murray (UK, 2014) |
Publication date | August 6, 2013 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 288 |
| ISBN | 1-935639-62-5 |
The Virgins is the second novel by American author Pamela Erens, published in 2013 by Tin House Books. It received accolades from many sources including The New York Times, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.[2] Publishers Weekly named it one of the best boarding school books of all time.[2]
The novel is set in 1979 in Auburn Academy, an exclusive boarding school in New Hampshire (based on Phillips Exeter Academy, where Erens herself was a student).[3][4] It is narrated by Bruce Bennett-Jones, who looks back on the overtly demonstrative romance between Aviva Rossner, the Jewish daughter of a wealthy physician, and Seung Jung, a Korean American with demanding parents and a penchant for drugs. The tale, though told as fact, is very much the imaginings of the love-struck Bruce as he pieces together Aviva and Seung's relationship from his voyeuristic observations, though he himself plays a key role in the novel's tragic climax.
Inspiration
As Erens explains in an interview with the publisher, "I'd long wanted to write a novel that captured something about the 1970s and being a teenager then. Most teenagers in the seventies were born in the sixties—that is, they were the first American kids to be surrounded from the very start by all kinds of new ideas about freedom and sexuality. I had all three of my characters from the beginning, but my original idea was that there would be a more traditional love triangle. Somewhere pretty early on I came across an article by Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Review of Books on the work of James Salter. I am an enormous Salter fan and I had read his story collections and his novels A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years. The Oates article reminded me of the setup of A Sport and a Pastime—a male narrator tells the story of a romance in which he doesn't take part. That narrator describes encounters and events he couldn't possibly have been a witness to. Suddenly I knew that was what I wanted to do with my own novel."[4]
In an article for her UK publisher, Erens identified five novels which "helped me feel that the task of writing about teens and sex was an achievable one":[5]
- Endless Love, Scott Spencer (1979)
- If Beale Street Could Talk, James Baldwin (1974)
- The Folded Leaf, William Maxwell (1945)
- The Lover, Marguerite Duras (1984)
- That Night, Alice McDermott (1987)