The Understory

by Pamela Erens

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1935639854
• ISBN13: 9781935639855
• Release Date: April 2014
• Publisher: Tin House Books
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.1" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

A Reality Sharper Than Reality Itself

Many, many years have passed since I read Knut Hamsun's Hunger. I read it in its Latvian translation, a young writer eager to learn from the masters--and the Danish writer Hamsun was that. It was a novel about nothing, really. No car chases, no maddening mysteries, no ravishing love stories, no epiphanies. It was a simple story of survival--a homeless man coping with hunger--but it has remained with me all these decades later while so many other books I've read have faded into oblivion. It was a book touched with greatness. I recall Hamsun's Hunger now because in reading the slim novel called Understory by Pamela Erens, winner of the Ironweed Press Fiction Prize, I sensed the same effect. Yes, the same touch of literary greatness. This, too, was a story about nothing. It is simplicity itself; not even a story, but an "understory." The story behind the story, you might say, the diving deep into the mind and heart and soul of a man. There is little action, almost all the recording of observation, the gradual coiling and tightening of a spring, and all leading up to a stunning conclusion--that one moment of action--that is the perfection coming together of all that we have read to that point. As in Hamsun's masterpiece, we experience truth, as a human being experiences truth that is found in the minutiae of the every day. Life is like this, after all. The earth shattering upheavals and volcanic happenings are remarkable enough, easy to nail down on paper, memorable (or not) without even trying, but genius enters when one can create reality sharper almost than reality itself. Erens follows this haggard, lonely man in his unremarkable every day without missing a detail, and so brings him into the room where we sit, brings us into his room where he lives his solitary life, and lets us taste of it. He is poor, he is alone, he is a child abandoned by his parents through a car accident that took their lives, and so has learned to live in this quiet, unobtrusive way. He lives a life that happens mostly inside his mind. He reads and mulls over what he has read as a gourmet savors every bite of an exquisite meal. Indeed, when he is evicted from his home--an apartment where he has lived for 15 years as something of an imposter of his deceased uncle of similar name on a $500 monthly stipend left to him in a will--he wonders how is it that we do not value the thinkers in our society? Only the doers. Someone has to read all the books? Someone has to think all the thoughts? He is that someone. Even when something does happen in this man's days, it moves in a kind of slow motion, giving us time to note all the details of the scene, evoke the emotions one might have living the moment in real time rather than sound bite. We watch the building burn. We watch him resist leaving the ashen shell of his home, living among that ash when all others have moved elsewhere. We see him creep into odd emotions of need and want, not falling in love, but more a kind of cell b

Thoughtful psychological suspense to rival Graham Greene

A slow-building, intense look at one man's quiet psychological deterioration and yearning for love. Erens really reminded me of Graham Greene here, the skill and close observation -- there is not a bump or a glitch in this story. We really feel we are in the hands of a master storyteller. I look forward to her next title.

A quest for connection

Jack Gorse/Ronan the protagonist of Pamela Erens's smashing debut novel, The Understory, is a man obsessed: with twins, with vegetation, with books, with his routine, and with a kind-hearted architect named Patrick. He is also searching, it seems, for that other part of himself--the other half of himself. At one point, he hopes he will find that other within Patrick, but really that other is within him: "I imagine that I am a conjoined creature; two souls wrapped into one, and after a while this thought lulls me to sleep." Basically, he is unwittingly his own twin--and so gives himself two names. Everything is connected in Jack's world and there are no randomness of events something he's believed since childhood: "Every plant--everything, I was suddenly sure--was related, everything was part of some larger group, some bigger whole." In keeping with the twin-ness of things, the thread of connection, the book is told in interweaving chapters of past and present as we follow Jack through his troubles of the not so distant past (the events leading up to his eviction), his troubles of the present (he is in hiding in a Buddhist monastery in Vermont and they are wary of him), and his overarching troubles (the outcome of his involvement with Patrick). Despite his odd (and sometimes scary) behavior, Jack will win you over. You will wish him well. You will want him not to fail. And in the end, when you know his dark secrets and what horrible things he has done, you will hope that he will have a brighter tomorrow. In short: a masterful, graceful book that will often leave you breathless. Read it.

Excellent, engaging first novel

Jack Gorse is a complicated man. The particularity of his nature is revealed in the book's opening paragraph as he describes an episode of curdled cream in his self-serve coffee--an episode that led him forever after to drink his coffee black and obsessively double check each time he fills his cup. We soon learn that he is also facing eviction from a rent-controlled apartment in New York City, an apartment he has illegally inhabited for years following the death of a similarly named uncle. The slow, cold war of attrition that ensues leaves Jack the only remaining tenant, and the architect hired to oversee the project his only human contact. The ever unfolding layers of Jack's personality reveal a man both intelligent and oddly naïve, shy and slyly voyeuristic, cunning and emotionally guileless. He is a fascinating man. He is also a quiet man, but even though this story is a first-person narrative, I would hesitate to label it a quiet book. The Understory crackles with the energy of compulsion and unrequited obsession that is slowly and meticulously revealed in a way that could be called meditative (for its gradually deepening understanding), except for the fact that Jack fails miserably at meditation. No, the true genius in the storytelling here is that Jack reveals his deepest self, without actually revealing his deepest self. He simply recounts, while we see what he cannot. In fact, it's this continual dichotomous tendency that serves up the book's delicious tension. Gorse is beset by a stubborn ennui that plays against a dramatic narrative backdrop of eviction notices, narrowly escaped fires, and a culminating scene of violence that is as sudden and unexpected as it is dramatically right. The Understory is a book that relentlessly and incrementally pulls you forward on intelligent tenterhooks till you slap against a conclusion that resonates long after the turning of the final page.

Great debut!

A great debut novel from Pamela Erens (and winner of the Ironwood Press Fiction Prize). This is one of those books you just want to stay home from work to finish reading. The lead character is Jack Gorse, an unemployed loner whose daily routines (that border on OCD) give him a purpose in life. (In this sense the writing reminds me of the best of Magnus Mills, the way you as the reader slip into the character's mind and daily doings.) The routines, however, are upset when Jack is evicted from his apartment. Things begin to spiral out of control for him without these routines, and as he loses his grip on life, he grasps at the straws of an impossible/imagined relationship.