When Saint Augustine wrote “I did not yet love, and I loved to love; I sought what I might love, in love with loving,” he was talking about his on-again-off-again relationship with the Almighty, and the occasional lapse into more earthly desires. Still, with not too big a stretch of the imagination, the phrase could also apply to a group of sexually awakening preps away at boarding school, the subject of Pamela Erens’s excellent second novel, The Virgins. The year is 1979, the setting is Auburn Academy (an Exeter look-alike), the ethos is sexual, emotional, psychic frustration and release. “We beginners experienced sex as psyche more than body,” Erens writes, “as vulnerability and power, exposure and flight, being anointed, saved, transfigured.”
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By Pamela Erens (Tin House Books) Reading Fri 10/11, 6:30 PM Book Stall at Chestnut Court 811 Elm, Winnetka
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