Virgin territory
Every year, I observe the day I lost my virginity. “Celebrate” would be too strong a word. This particular anniversary is easy to remember because it falls on a friend’s birthday (she wasn’t involved), and I usually acknowledge it with a wry joke to my husband — who also wasn’t involved. The day gets a nod, but it doesn’t require cake, or gifts or prayer because losing my virginity did not change my life.
But we’re often told otherwise; the image of sex as transformation is so common it’s no wonder the inexperienced take it for gospel. One can’t blame Julia Greenfield, the funny and lovable narrator of Emma Rathbone’s second novel, “Losing It,” for spending much of her mental energy plotting to rid herself of her virginity once and for all.
At the book’s opening, she is 26 years old and working at a soulless corporate job outside Washington, D.C., a place where she knows no one, save a cousin she doesn’t like. Her apartment complex is next to “a glinting four-lane highway,” and she is deeply lonely. Ever since she stopped swimming competitively her junior year of college, she’s been adrift.
Julia doesn’t know who she is, or what she wants — beyond losing her virginity, that is. According to her, she is “bottlenecked in adolescence, having somehow screwed up what came so easily to everyone else.”
In the first chapter, Julia impetuously quits her job and heads to North Carolina to stay with her aunt Vivienne, a woman she hasn’t seen for years and barely knows. Aunt Viv, who lives alone, has a passion for painting decorative scenes on plates, and her guest room reminds Julia of “a slightly moldering bed-and-breakfast, down to the little satchels of potpourri leaning against a mirror.”
It’s in this distinctly not-sexy environment that Julia devotes herself to her quest. She gets a part-time job as a receptionist, attends a watercolor class, tries online dating, all in the name of finding a sexual partner.
As the novel progresses, the reader learns not only how Julia came to be a 26-year-old virgin but also how she interprets her situation. She describes one missed opportunity as a moment when her “fate changed,” and later she wonders how, unlike her, other people “operate on these meridians of luck.” That Julia is a former athlete deepens her sense of betrayal. Her body was once powerful. Now what is it for?
Julia tries to fight her lack of agency with flat-footed attempts at romance. “Losing It” deftly charts the shifting temperatures of awkward social situations, and the reader gets to wince along with its characters.
If the story’s premise at times feels a little narrow, it’s only because Julia herself is such a rich heroine whom I would happily read about, no matter the plot. Her powers of perception reveal a contemporary America the reader will be embarrassed and delighted to recognize, from the probably homeless street busker who’s “like some background extra in a computer game” to the possible suitor who’s “wearing the ill-fitting jeans of a homeschooler, or someone who had been too protected to develop a sense of cultural agility.”
As with Rathbone’s very fine first novel, “The Patterns of Paper Monsters,” “Losing It” presents an accurate — and entertaining — depiction of what it feels like to be alive, right now, in this absurd, contemporary moment. Rathbone’s accuracy is what makes her so funny; it’s her grace as a writer that elevates this book from a series of comedic one-liners to art.
With each failure to lose her virginity, Julia’s conviction that she is abnormal, marked in some way, intensifies. Even as the book’s warmth and humor continues, with Julia imagining various strangers in sexual scenarios (for instance, she pictures a woman having “deep, oaky orgasms,”) her loneliness rises to a panicked pitch.
Makes sense. She’s surrounded by heaps of cultural junk — an office calendar printed with dancing tamales, for instance, and “the bending women and vacant men, tan, slick, violent” of Internet porn. It isn’t really sex Julia needs. Or not only. It’s meaning and intimacy she longs for.
Of course, Rathbone doesn’t let her narrator remain alienated and alone. The ending is somewhat predictable, but no matter, because Julia’s success in the bedroom isn’t Rathbone’s point. What has changed by the last chapter is not so much the heroine’s status as a sexual being, but as a human one. Julia has started to figure out what matters, what is real.
And it’s her relationship with her aunt that has changed the most, has offered that promise of transformation, however fleeting. Their moments of intimacy, connection and conflict are more lasting than anything sexual that occurs in these pages. Emma Rathbone’s project, it turns out, is more ambitious than expected. That’s something to celebrate.