The Understory: A Novel

Product Description

Set in New York City and in a Buddhist monastery in rural Vermont, The Understory is both a mystery and a psychological study and reveals that repression and self-expression can be equally destructive. The Understory―the debut novel from the critically acclaimed author of The Virgins ―is the haunting portrayal of Jack Gorse, an ex-lawyer, now unemployed, who walls off his inner life with elaborate rituals and routines. Every day he takes the same walk from his Upper West Side apartment to the Brooklyn Bridge. He follows the same path through Central Park; he stops to browse in the same bookstore, to eat lunch in the same diner. Threatened with eviction from his longtime apartment and caught off-guard by an attraction to a near stranger, Gorse takes steps that lead to the dramatic dissolution of the only existence he’s known. As the narrative alternates between his days in New York City and his present life in a Vermont Buddhist Monastery, The Understory unfolds as both a mystery and a psychological study, revealing that repression and self-expression can be equally destructive.

Review

“I am amazed and moved by Pamela Erens’s
The Understory. It brings to mind (and stands up well next to) such literary ancestors as Hamsun’s Hunger, or Beckett’s stories of the evicted, but it is
uniquely tender in its treatment of the isolated mind’s quest to keep alive what is most radiant and most fragile in the face of the brutal catastrophe of reality. Erens brings extraordinary powers of empathy and technical mastery to the character of Jack Gorse—normally the person we pass on the street and, after a token moment of pity, attempt to forget as rapidly as possible. In this book there is no turning away from him, or more accurately and terribly, from the world as he perceives it.”
— Franz Wright, author of
Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“This is a strange, haunting meditation on aloneness and the melancholy of frustrated love, written knowingly about a character bereft of self-knowledge. The language is precise and considered, the mood sustained, the effect at once narrative and poetic.
A lovely, elegant debut novel.”
— Andrew Solomon, author of
The Noonday Demon, winner of the National Book Award, and
Far From the Tree, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

“
A wonderfully controlled portrait of a contemporary Underground Man — a man who buries his life beneath the normal social interactions of modern-day Manhattan, so that what is inside of him might stay buried too.”
— Jonathan Dee, author of
The Privileges, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

“Pamela Erens’s
The Understory is at once an exquisite portrait of a man driven by forces beyond his control, an homage to Manhattan’s secret places, and
a deftly braided narrative that keeps the reader hungry to find out what happens next.”
—Rilla Askew, author of
Fire in Beulah, winner of the American Book Award

“Erens follows this haggard, lonely man in his unremarkable every day without missing a detail…This solitary man who cannot connect even in a crowd, eventually implodes, and explodes, and the sense of following him through this process is
a literary meditation I will long not forget. It is for this kind of fine literature that I hunger all my reading life, and find all too rarely.”
—Zinta Aistars, Gently Read Literature

“Hauntingly abject…skillfully rendered
a sensitive, restrained debut.”
—
Publishers Weekly

“
Mesmerizing…a universal human cry for love.”
—
ForeWord Magazine

“An elegant, understated study of physical and psychic dislocations
artfully detailed and beautifully rendered.”
—the
Chicago Tribune

”
This is storytelling at its finest, lightest and most complex. I enjoyed every moment of the time Jack and I spent together. I let my tea go cold as he talked. I hope one day we meet again, although, because of the way things go, I doubt we will.”
—LitReactor

“Not your typical debut…The soul of this novel is its m