2013 | Page 9 | The Common

Review: The Virgins

September 23, 2013 Reviews

Book by PAMELA ERENS
Reviewed by DEBORAH MICHEL

The prep-school novel has never grabbed me. Maybe it’s because I’m a Californian who didn’t go to an exclusive New England boarding school or send my children to one. Maybe it’s because these novels (yes, you, A Separate Peace, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Prep, A Starboard Sea, and all the Harry Potter books, not to mention The Dead Poet’s Society, even though it’s a movie)—seem precious and predictable portraits of a cossetted (albeit often deadly) social niche.

The Virgins, however, is different. This elegant new novel by Pamela Erens (who attended Phillips Exeter) defies niche or genre. It is indeed set in an East Coast boarding school, and this setting plays a large role, but Erens does so many more interesting things than the usual exploration of class and teen angst, not least the creation of an utterly original female protagonist, the spiky, seductive, cringe-producing Aviva Rossner, whose aggressively Jewish name alone invokes a knowing frisson as soon as it appears. In the very next sentence, the narrator, another student, announces his name: Bruce Bennett-Jones. Erens has already subverted our expectations.We just don’t know it yet.

The Bridge

September 18, 2013 Dispatches

By CHRIS KELSEY

The first time I visited Copenhagen I decided to quit my job. I had spent five years working nearly 60 hours per week as an editor, I never took vacation, I was struggling with finances, and I was deeply unhappy. My parents, who were closing in on retirement, had been to Ireland not long before and the travel bug for Europe had struck. Now they chose Denmark. To my good fortune, they treated their three adult children to this August trip.

Chatham Rock

September 17, 2013 Essays

By MARTA MCDOWELL

For a gardener, geology is destiny. My little bit of earth is in a town surrounded on three sides by water. Chatham, New Jersey, sits at an elbow of the Passaic River that forms its northern and eastern boundaries. To the south, the so-called Great Swamp soaks vast acreage. Yet for all of its perimeter liquid, the town is built on rock.

West Eugene Dawn, Summer Solstice

September 16, 2013 In House, Poetry

By JAMES ALAN GILL

The first sound is the gong

Of a dumpster, kicked possibly

By one of the homeless twins

Who live at The Mission, followed

By the rattle of glass and aluminum—

Signs of early success—against the cages

Of their grocery carts filled with cans, bottles,

Anything stamped with 5¢ deposit

Next to our state’s abbreviation.

Hermitage

September 11, 2013 Dispatches

By ELLIOTT HOLT

My friend K. and I traveled to St. Petersburg on the overnight train from Moscow, where I lived then. She had come from New York to visit me. It was December, 1997, and the cold was brutal, but you have to see the Hermitage, I said. So we took the train north and then, at dawn, made our way to the international youth hostel. It was the first one in Russia—opened in 1992—and like every hostel I’d visited, it was full of backpackers eager to tell us how much of the world they had seen. No one’s hostile in a hostel, I said to K. She and I had been out of college for just a couple of years; our fellow travelers were about our age. Many of them were from Australia and New Zealand. At breakfast that first morning— a room with tentative light and forlorn bowls of muesli—we met a young Japanese-Finnish woman. (Her parents were Japanese, but she’d been raised in Finland.) She had traveled from Helsinki, she told us, to photograph corpses.

Garbage Island

September 10, 2013 Essays

By SAMANTHA K. SMITH

“You’re from Garbage Island,” a college friend said.

He wasn’t wrong. My hometown housed Fresh Kills, once the largest landfill in the world – so vast it could be seen from outer space with the naked eye. My classmate was from Queens, which, according to the rest of the city, was still a notch above Staten Island, the forgotten borough of parks. The borough with New York City’s trash.

Coney Island Pilgrims Launch Party

September 10, 2013 News and Events

Event Date:

Friday, September 27, 2013 – 5:00pm

Location:

Amherst Books

Join poetry editor for The Common John Hennessy in celebrating the publication of his new collection of poetry, Coney Island Pilgrms.

Hennessy, who teaches at the University of Massachusetts, is author of the previous collection of poetry, _Bridge & Tunnel_. His poems have appeared in many journals & anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2013, The Believer, Poetry, Harvard Review, The New Republic, The Huffington Post, & The Yale Review.

Beowulf. Readings. Beer.

September 9, 2013 News and Events

Event Date:

Thursday, September 26, 2013 – 6:00pm – 8:00pm

Location:

High Horse

Break out the beer and mead! As part of the Amherst Poetry Festival (Sept. 20-27), The Common has partnered with the Emily Dickinson Museum and Amherst Business Improvement District to bring you a night of Beowulf, readings, and beer at the High Horse upstairs pool hall on Thursday, September 26 from 6-8pm. From 6-7pm, contributors and friends of The Common will read poetry and fiction inspired by the epic poem. Then, from 7-8pm, UMass English Professor Stephen Harris will discuss Beowulf with epic readings in English and Old English to the beat of a drum. Indulge your inner medievalist and join us for a night that will “fill Heorot with head-clearing voice, / gladdening that great rally of Geats and Danes.”

Featuring readings by The Common contributors Brad Leithauser and Naila Moreira.

beowulf_0913_brbflyer

Angels Landing

September 6, 2013 Essays

By MARIAN CROTTY

It’s summer in Zion National Park, and I am thinking about water. Thunderstorms have felled trees and left silt in the air, and the river slicing through the center of the canyon rushes high and murky, the warm red brown of long-brewed chai. Sagebrush sweetness mixes with evergreen; cedar leaves rustle; and in the morning cool below mountains of rock, it doesn’t feel like Utah.