New “Virgins” Novel Inspired by PEA

From John Knowles’s revered A Separate Peace to director Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society, the snow-cloaked fields of East Coast prep schools have become the homes of fictitious heroes for decades. More recently, parallel versions of Exeter continue to serve as the model for some of these stories, its marble steps and red brick buildings painted on the page.Author Pamela Erens ‘81 has recently added another tale of an imagined Exeter to the stack, with her newest novel, The Virgins, published in August. Erens tried to recreate the feel of Exeter in the late 1970s in her novel’s Auburn Academy, and she explores the evolution of her characters through the trials of adolescence.The story of The Virgins is told by Bruce Bennett-Jones—an unsettling and sometimes unreliable narrator—as he reflects on his teenage years at Auburn from his adult life. Early on in the novel, Bennett-Jones, a coxswain for the school’s crew team, tries to rape fellow student Aviva Rossner in the abandoned boathouse. After she manages to fend him off, Bennett-Jones becomes obsessed with Aviva and her relationship with Seung Jung, the son of Korean immigrants with a penchant for marijuana. An undercurrent of sex and power runs through the story and its characters as they make their way through their years away at boarding school.Erens said she tried to represent the feeling of Exeter that she remembered from her years at the Academy.“I’d come from a small, very homogenous private school that I’d attended for many years. Exeter was, for me, a journey into a much larger world. The general public tends to think of boarding schools as narrow, elitist environments, but they’re sometimes quite the opposite,” Erens said. “For the first time in my life, I got to know kids who were very different from me in terms of family background, family income, part of the country or world they lived in, race, and life experience. I made good, dear friends. I was pushed academically to do better work than I’d gotten away with doing back at home, and I found I liked that.”Erens worked to channel the energy of Exeter into her writing. “In my novel I wanted to capture the real feel of the student body – not the stereotype – and also the sheer physical beauty of the place,” she added. “I also wanted to capture the heady sense of freedom that a school like Exeter can bring to 14-, 15-, 16-, and 17-year-olds – a freedom that I certainly felt.”English instructor Nathaniel Hawkins described the curiosity directed at boarding and private schools, and why so many novels may attempt to capture their elusive way of life.“I think that there’s sort of a fascination from outside about places like Exeter,” Hawkins said. “Private school, if you didn’t go to it – I didn’t go to private school – is a mysterious other world that you don’t know anything about. It seems to me that it’s almost less interesting from within. Even from just outside the gates, there’s a mystery to these places because they’re inaccessible to so many people.”English instructor Christina Breen offered an insight into the genre of boarding school fiction.“I think the authors write books about boarding school because they went to boarding school, so they’re writing about what they know best. Boarding schools tend to be very formative experiences for writers, so there are stories to tell,” Breen said. “I think the reason why it’s marketable and why people buy the books is that elite New England boarding schools have a stereotype around them – that they are for privileged kids and are a pathway to the Ivy League and success in life. Now, that stereotype is not true, but if you are not from the private school world, that may be a stereotype that exists, so that would be intriguing.”Breen also commented on the unique geographical environment of boarding schools. “Academic and professional and personal lives are all intermeshed within this postage stamp, geographically,” she said. “There are a lot of connections between people, and a lot of things can happen, good or bad.”The ideas of the late ‘70s permeate the novel as well, and the environment that the characters are growing up in mirrors the culture that Erens experienced during her high school years.“It’s a time where co-education is still fairly new, the sexual revolution is still influential, and drugs are seen with less suspicion than they will later be. It’s a time before AIDS and the Reagan revolution and a turn toward more political conservatism in the country,” Erens said. “My Exeter felt highly sexualized and free-spirited to me, shot through with a good deal of anti-authoritarianism. But if I had been a different kind of kid, a different kind of student, it might not have seemed that way at all.”John Irving ‘61, the author of The World According to Garp, another novel set at an Exeter-esque boarding school, reviewed The Virgins for The New York Times. Irving recognized the constant presence of sex in adolescence and throughout Erens’ novel and how the boarding school environment accentuated it.“...Bennett-Jones renders Aviva and Seung so palpably real that their sexuality is completely believable,” Irving wrote. “While Bennett-Jones crudely visualizes Aviva when he masturbates, he nonetheless has the sensitivity to understand the heightened sexual anxiety of young men and women in boarding-school confinement.”Erens said that although school administrations likely deal with sexual education more effectively now than they did when she attended Exeter, not all things can be taught in a classroom or imparted by an adult.“You can make sure kids have access to birth control, that they know how to protect themselves from pregnancy and STDs,” Erens said. “What’s much, much harder is deciding how to support kids as they figure out what sex means to them emotionally, psychologically. How they fit desire into their lives. How they learn to define intimacy for themselves. Teenagers generally don’t want that from adults. They generally have to figure this stuff out for themselves, through time and experience, and it’s not easy.”