Pamela Erens

The Understory was published by Ironweed Press in fall 2007.

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. Ex-lawyer Jack Gorse walls off his inner life with elaborate rituals and routines. Threatened with eviction from his longtime apartment and caught off-guard by an attraction to a near stranger, he takes steps that lead to the dramatic dissolution of the existence he's known.

"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, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Walking to Martha's Vineyard

"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, winner of the National Book Award for The Noonday Demon


"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."
     --Chicago Tribune

"not your typical debut.... The soul of this novel is its meditative lyricism, rendered in language that is as exquisite as it is penetrating."
     --Small Spiral Notebook

"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, American Book Award winner for Fire in Beulah

"The Understory comes to a gripping finale. Erens ... is a very talented writer, and this slender volume is a welcome addition to contemporary fiction."
     --Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide

"rich ... a carefully imagined novel that makes a powerful social statement in an oblique but focused way."
     --Books for Readers

"This novel derives its power from Erens' ability to create a character who is simultaneously repulsive and sympathetic.... [She has] given us insight into the very human desire to make this world--and our lives--matter."
     --El Paso Times

"The Understory crackles with the energy of compulsion and unrequited obsession ... [it] is a book that relentlessly and incrementally pulls you forward on intelligent tenterhooks."
     --MaryAkers.blogspot.com

"Pamela Erens explores the double identity of an apparently ordinary urbanite as he crosses the line between big-city loneliness and calamitous obsession. Erens's trance-like prose creates two radically different worlds with one unsettling atmosphere. She reminds me most of Patricia Highsmith in the way she deftly, matter-of-factly pins her subject to the page.
     --Lesley Dormen, author of The Best Place to Be

"We have such a deep understanding of and sympathy for the engaging but troubled Jack that we willingly follow him into the dark corners of his wounded psyche."
     --Rain Taxi

"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 Palladio and The Liberty Campaign

"Jack Gorse, the eccentric narrator of Pamela Erens's unusual debut, will be difficult for me to forget. The story of his journey from an illegally inhabited New York City apartment to a Buddhist monastery unspools at a perfect pace. The Understory is part mystery, part picaresque, and completely satisfying."
     --Natalie Danford, author of Inheritance


From the novel:

Many years ago, in a deli, I found flaky white bits floating in my self-serve coffee; the milk, sitting all day in a bucket of cold water, had turned sour. Since that day I have never drunk my coffee anything but black. Yet I look for those tainted curls every time: I pour, peer inside to reassure myself, then top it off.

Even here I am bound to my habits. I pour, pause, bend to my mug. All at once Joku is standing next to me at the end of the buffet table. He looks down as if he too suspects that something is wrong with my drink. I move the mug away, toward me, and by the time I have accomplished this I've forgotten my most recent action. Did I already look inside? I think so, but it nags at me that I don't know for sure. The glass coffeepot, suspended above the mug, is beginning to hurt my wrist. Joku is watching me now, and I become even more flustered and uncomfortable. To look twice is not good, not the way things should be, but I decide it is better than failing to look at all. So I glance in, confirm that the surface of the coffee is black and pure, then finish filling the mug and replace the pot on the electric hot plate. Joku moves off, toward the metal trays of kidney beans and homemade bread and peanut butter.

Normally his staring wouldn't rattle me so much. I have grown used to it. He watches me in the dining hall, during chores, as we file into the meditation hall for zazen. He is so open about it, does not spy or hide. His head turns as we pass in the hallways. Without a doubt the abbot has asked him to keep tabs on me. For what if I am mentally unbalanced, a troublemaker? But today was different. Today Joku came so close that he nearly touched me.