Five stars for The Starboard Sea

One of the great pleasures in life is to get totally lost in a book. And a couple of weeks ago, I picked up Amber Dermont’s debut novel The Starboard Sea and didn’t want to set it down. Not only is it a fast-paced story with rich characters and a central mystery, set among the privileged class at a New England boarding school, but it is also, in a way, an offspring of Houston’s rich literary community.

Amber spent five years in Houston working on her PhD in fiction at the UH Creative Writing Program, graduating in the spring of 2006, after receiving a C. Glenn Cambor Fellowship and Barthelme Memorial Prize in fiction from Inprint. She went on to teach at Rice for a year, as a Parks Fellow, a position offered to one graduate of the UH Program each year. During those years of writing, the beginnings of this book were developed. And it is a very good book by any standard, worthy of two reviews in The New York Times including the cover review of the Sunday Book Review.

In reading The Starboard Sea, comparisons to last fall’s popular book The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach are inevitable. I loved each of these books for many of the same reasons: the universality of adolescent angst, deep friendships, the pure wonder of an athlete absorbed in his skill and instinct, and sports as a metaphor for life.

In reading The Starboard Sea, comparisons to last fall’s popular book The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach are inevitable. I loved each of these books for many of the same reasons: the universality of adolescent angst, deep friendships, the pure wonder of an athlete absorbed in his skill and instinct, and sports as a metaphor for life.

At 311 pages, Dermont’s book is the more tightly written of the two, with beautiful, succinct prose. The central character, Jason Prosper, arrives at a new boarding school for his senior year―a boarding school of last resort. He left (or was kicked out of) his previous school after the suicide of his roommate/sailing partner/best friend from childhood. He is haunted by his loss and a sense of responsibility for it.  At Bellingham Academy he is determined to nurse his wounds and remain aloof from the other students, but finds a kindred spirit in Aidin, a troubled student with her own mysterious past.

In a recent article in the New Yorker on Edith Wharton, Jonathan Franzen wrote of the readers’ sympathy for a novel’s characters or for the author as the essential ingredient of a successful work of fiction. From the very first page, I deeply cared for Jason Prosper, and my admiration for Amber Dermont has grown significantly. Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of The Starboard Sea and allow yourself to enter another world.