Fleur Macdonald
Losing It
The Virgins
By Pamela Erens
John Murray 281pp £14.99
The gulf between expectation and experience makes the loss of virginity one of the most literary of life’s rites of passage. Not having done ‘it’ is as ineffably character-defining – or damning – at school as being a prefect or a star of the sports team. But once it’s gone, bemused detachment makes the agonies of a past self seem unreal. In The Virgins, Pamela Erens’s approach is more sincere than funny. Before plunging us into the sweaty intensity of first love, the grown-up narrator asks, ‘Please do not smirk; try to remember what it was like, once upon a time.’ The school is reportedly based on the one Erens, former editor of Glamour, attended – an elite East Coast institution that counts John Irving and John Knowles as alumni. This unhealthy Eden is a claustrophobic hothouse where drugs are rife and authority figures absent.
Under watchful eyes, new girl Aviva – kohl smudged, jumpers slinky, nose a little too Jewish and eating habits increasingly frugal – falls in love with Seung, a quiet Korean-American on the swimming team who likes to look up the chemical compounds of the drugs he takes and fashions love
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
This and two more newly available pieces from our October 1984 issue in our From the Archives newsletter. Sign up on our website so you never miss another dispatch.
Congratulations to @HanKangOfficial, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2024.
We've lifted the paywall on Joanna Kavenna's review of The White Book from November 2017.
Joanna Kavenna - Carte Blanche
Joanna Kavenna: Carte Blanche - The White Book by Han Kang (Translated by Deborah Smith)
literaryreview.co.uk
Few surveys of British art exist. Those that do have given disproportionate space to recent trends and neglected the 150 years between Hogarth and Turner.
@robinsimonbaj examines what launched British artists of this era into the European stratosphere.
Robin Simon - The Wright Stuff
Robin Simon: The Wright Stuff - The Invention of British Art by Bendor Grosvenor
literaryreview.co.uk