Rebecca Wolff  Rebecca Wolff, author of "The Beginners." (Sarah
Shatz/ Riverhead Books / July 10, 2011)  The Beginners  A Novel
Rebecca Wolff  Sign Up For Traffic Text Alerts  Riverhead: 304
pp., $26.95  Poet Rebecca Wolff's first novel, "The Beginners,"
is a gothic story of sexual awakening with a sharp literary
edge. Ginger Pritt, 15, is a year ahead of her age in school in
small-town Massachusetts, working in the local diner and
learning about sex from her boss' porn stash. She's not unhappy,
but her parents are distant and a childhood best friendship is
showing signs of fracture.  The time is pre-Internet and pre-
cellphone, and the setting is — where else? — near Salem, home
of the famous 17th century witch trials. It is the town's
haunted history, in part, that draws a pair of strangers there.
Raquel and Theo Motherwell, dissolute, attractive grad-student-
types, fascinate Ginger. Raquel is loquacious, prone to filling
silences with theoretical and literary musings and intimate
sexual details; Theo is la