"The Starboard Sea," a Novel by Amber Dermont The template for Amber Dermont's first novel is deceptively familiar. "The Starboard Sea" follows Jason Prosper, a Manhattan kid from a family as wealthy as that surname implies. As the book begins, Jason is headed for a New England prep school, Bellingham Academy, to complete his last pre-Princeton year. Boys from this family go to Princeton. That is as much a staple of Prosper life as the flattering John Singer Sargent portrait of Great-Great-Grandmother in the family's Manhattan formal dining room. The circumstances under which Jason arrives at Bellingham are somehow tainted and peculiar. But this, too, seems to fit a well-worn pattern. There is something in his past that forced him out of a better school, Kensington Prep, and off to this last-ditch sanctuary; Bellingham is at one point described as a kind of Island of Misfit Toys. The trouble, whatever it was, involved the death of Jason's roommate and sailing partner, Cal. These two schoolboys were very close in ways that the book is not immediately willing to explain. "The Starboard Sea" begins with Jason's trip from New York to Bellingham, which sits scenically on the New England coast and sounds ideally suited to Jason's sailing talents. Now things start to get more interesting. Whatever happened to Cal is enough to keep Jason off the water. One of the first things this expert sailor does at Bellingham is to engineer a way to stay on dry land. Jason comes from a beloved, clichéd fiction-writers" milieu in which prep school kids know all about one another by inference and intuition. "If I didn't know someone personally," Jason tells the reader, he may still know "what his mother kept in the divorce" and "if his nanny had a French accent or a French Creole accent." It is in this spirit of incestuous familiarity that the book's other students are introduced. Yet the best of these characters turn out to be much more nuanced and interesting than they seem at first. Ms. Dermont uses a measured, incisive, not all that boyish voice to present discerning character sketches of Jason's new comrades, who range from thuggish to fragile. One boy's father died on the family's Boston Whaler. One girl throws a gift from Tiffany back at her father when he comes to visit. Aidan, the red-haired girl who most intrigues Jason, had a Hollywood upbringing, thinks Robert Mitchum may have been her father and keeps a pair of Fred Astaire's dancing shoes in her dorm room. "You know that song "Hotel California"?" Aidan asks. That's my mom. By the time the boisterous boys and the ethereal Aidan have been fully introduced, "The Starboard Sea" has permanently parted ways with the predictable. This is not a strictly prep school story. Its secrets are not tacked on or contrived. It is a rich, quietly artful novel that is bound for deep water, with questions of beauty, power and spiritual navigation as its main concerns. The title refers not to the right side of a boat but to the right course through life, and the immense difficulty of finding and following it. Not far into the book, Ms. Dermont indicates that Cal and Aidan will haunt Jason in similar ways, and not just because each has an erotic hold on him. Jason is very guarded, but he slips and uses the word "beautiful" to describe Cal to Aidan. He and his lost roommate shared an intense physical closeness, and the author describes it with simple eloquence. ("To be with someone who is stronger than you. To have him relinquish his strength.") But Jason is also drawn to this strange, elusive girl. When he has lost both Cal and Aidan, he faces an unbearable burden of grief and guilt. "The Starboard Sea" contemplates the difference between beauty and art. That difference is especially stark in 1987, when the book is set, the stock market is about to crash, and the rich kids regard their Rodins and Renoirs as financial assets. Jason knows better; at one point in the story he treats the family Sargent with contempt. He is far more affected by the eerie, terrible imagery of yachts being airlifted by helicopters out of a hurricane-ravaged harbor, on a day that will prove to be a turning point in his life. Another image that sticks with him: the sight of two glamorous girls from an especially prestigious school, left unconscious, their faces scribbled on with markers, after the kind of partying in which Bellingham kids indulge. There is a reason that Bellingham allows such things to happen. Jason's father provides a prime example of how this works when he donates two buildings to the school as a clumsy way of protecting his son. But the financial world is shaky. And Jason is on the verge of adulthood. He is wise enough about what money means to his father, brother and mother to know that it will not play the same role in his own life. At the end of "The Starboard Sea" Ms. Dermont shoehorns in a couple of Jason's observations about what will happen "years from now" to the Bellingham set. But the book does not really extend beyond this single school year, even though its author writes and thinks like someone older and wiser than its narrator. This small novel has the authority of a much bigger one, to the point of seeming artificially constricted. But the glimpses of how Jason might change his life are clear. At one point he confides to a near-stranger about his classmates" lives of privilege; one boy, whose acceptance at Harvard is guaranteed by family status, has greeted Derek Bok, Harvard's president, with a casual "Hey, Bok." The boy gets away with this. "Look, kid," says the man to whom Jason tries to describe his friends" arrogance, "I just drive the car."